The Evidence of Things Not Seen
by meldahlie
Summary: What did a certain Telmarine Lady-in-Waiting think during the War of Deliverance? An alternative PoV from "Prince Caspian" and a sequel for To An Unknown God.
1. Chapter 1

The Evidence of Things Not Seen

What did a certain Telmarine Lady-in-Waiting think during the War of Deliverance?

An alternative PoV from "Prince Caspian" and a sequel for To An Unknown God.

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"A little nearer … and then a cushion … no, not that high. A softer cushion … ooh, ooh … well, I suppose that will do. You can go … send Lady Berenice with a cup of chamomile in a few minutes, won't you?"

Queen Prunaprismia leaned back in her padded armchair, with her feet propped up on the footstool and closed her eyes with a plaintive little sigh. The Lady-in-Waiting before her dropped a brief curtsey, turned and went out of the door without saying anything. Only when she had shut the door, crossed the ante-chamber and shut the next door with a rather more vigorous bang did the Lady Gwen let out her breath from behind clenched teeth. "Eeeessshhh!"

It was not a lady-like noise. She knew that. But when you have spent an entire afternoon attending a fat and foolish queen whose feet are aching – well! Gwen considered it quite restrained on her part not to have resorted to something far _less_ lady-like.

Gwen rested one hand against the wall and stood still for a moment. It wasn't that she meant to be hard-hearted or unsympathetic. Anyone could have sore, aching feet – quite often the ladies-in-waiting had them – and it wasn't pleasant and couldn't be helped. But it was the fuss! They way the Queen sighed every other minute and the way nothing, nothing would do! It was always just a little too near or too high or too hard or too-!

"Fat," said Gwen to the wall. "Some people have ankles which are just a little too fat." She shook her head. It was funny, really, the way Queen Prunaprismia had grown so fat, when she had been so slight and pretty as a girl. Foolish, always vacantly foolish, but the littlest, prettiest whisp of a thing. The sort of girl who had always had a string of devoted admirers hovering about her and made Gwen feel permanently tall and big and leggy and bone-y.

Gwen smiled. She'd told that string of bothersome adjectives to Lord Rhoop, once. They must have been about sixteen or seventeen, just when it was becoming obvious that Prince Miraz, despite being a little older, had joined the crowd of Lady Prunaprismia's admirers with a definite purpose.

"But Gwen!" Rhoop had exclaimed. "If you were like that – like, like a china doll – it would be awful! We boys would be afraid to come anywhere near you, lest you get chipped or broken! No," he'd finished firmly. "Give me my Gwen. Just as you are."

She couldn't remember, now. It hadn't been the first time he'd kissed her – of course, the _very_ first time Rhoop had kissed her had been an embarrassed and chivalrous seven year old page boy's peck on the cheek the day she'd fallen out of the apple tree on his head – but it had been one of the early times. Well...

This time Gwen combined the smile with a sigh. Just as you are – and what a long time ago that was. She spread out her hands and looked at them critically. They were still big and bone-y, which was, perhaps, something, when Prunaprismia had got all fat and red and puffy, but they were undeniably older. Time had passed inexorably. Rhoop was long gone. For all his promise, not he nor any of the other 'boys' – Bern, Mavramorn, Argoz, Octesian, Restimar, Revilian – had come back from that adventure to the end of the world. Just as Miraz had intended. And who remembered them now?

Herself, that was about all. And sometimes it seemed so very long ago that even her fancied whisper of a phrase which sprang to mind when she thought of Rhoop was dim. _Courage, dear heart..._ What good was courage?

Rhoop was gone. The king was gone. Her cousins were gone. Even the Queen was gone. Miraz was king, and few remembered he had once been only Lord Protector. Lady Prunaprismia was now the queen, fat, and as foolish as ever. And herself?

Gwen shrugged. She was still here, the exception which proved the rule that the queen's ladies-in-waiting were as fat and foolish as herself. She had just stayed on, changed from one queen to the next, from Maid Attendant to Lady-in-Waiting. There hadn't been anything else to do. Her vague fears that Miraz might have wanted her to marry had proved unfounded. She was just – forgotten, a habit, a face who is always there in the court. And in a dull way, she'd chosen to be like that. Waiting. Waiting for something that was probably never going to happen.

Once, and only once, had she been tempted to draw attention to herself, and in the end she had not done so. There had been a huge, almost terrifying fuss made when it had been discovered that Prince Caspian's old nurse had been telling him the old folk legends of Narnia, those innocent children's tales of a mythical golden age and the four kings and queens of Cair Paravel. The queen's crowd of ladies-in-waiting had whispered to each other like a flock of anxious sparrows of how angry the king was, how he would have the old woman beheaded.

At that Gwen had thought, for a while, she must do something, must go to the king and beg of him to spare the nurse's life. She had been old, a little deaf, a little simple – not worth executing for foolish old stories. But even as Gwen had screwed her courage up for such heroics, Miraz seemed to reach the same conclusion, for he had simply sent the nurse away, and got Prince Caspian a tutor instead.

Gwen's face brightened a little at the thought of the Prince. He was still there, at least, bright and bonny and blonde. If – if all had been as it should have been, her son by Rhoop would have been only a little younger than him. A young friend and companion, maybe, as Rhoop himself had been to Caspian the Ninth. And – well, Gwen knew her imagination was biased. Her son would have been as fair and frank and good as Rhoop, and in better company, for what she knew of Prince Caspian, at the distance of a Queen's Lady-in-Waiting from the separate entourage of the Crown Prince, was better than his father.

Caspian the Ninth had been justly king – but there were things you did not remember about him.

Still, what mattered was that his son was here, and would one day be king. That, at least, would happen, and then the world would be right again, like a carpet pulled straight to show the proper pattern. No-one remembers the wrinkles; no-one troubles about those whose lives get lost and squashed among them.

Aye, but she was in a gloomy mood! Gwen straightened herself like her metaphorical carpet, and clapped her hands smartly behind and in front of herself. So, life was as it was. There was herself, and Prince Caspian, and that was about all that was left of the wreck of the old world. Gone, done, dusted by the endless duties of a Lady-in-Waiting.

Even as she started down the stairs to take a rest herself, if the queen was having one, a tiny, fierce core of Gwen was glad that it was that combination. For Prince Caspian was still there because Miraz had no son. And if she, Gwen, could have no sons, she was bitterly glad Prunaprismia had none either.

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 _A/N: With many thanks to Laura Andrews whose post-VotDT fic 'Sure As the Tide' really set me thinking about Gwen during PC. Ah, and as it's being posted in the run up to Christmas, the plot bunnies have mince pies for those who can place the title :)_


	2. Chapter 2

The Evidence of things not seen: Chapter 2 

_Sorry, another dose of Telmarine angst..._

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"A little nearer … and then a cushion … no, not that high. A softer cushion … ooh, ooh … well, I suppose that will do..."

Two ladies-in-waiting hovered anxiously over the queen, and Gwen stood further back and watched. Clothilde and Berenice were as fat and foolish as Prunaprismia, and it didn't seem to get the queen settled any faster. Perhaps that was why Gwen was still here, a sort of un-favourite favourite, the one who could actually get a cushion under the queen's feet and know when to ignore the plaintive whinings and leave it there so the queen was actually comfortable, whatever she thought or said.

Getting the queen comfortable these days was getting to be extremely difficult. Nobody was saying why. The queen had been like this twice before. Nothing had come of it, either time. This time, it had lasted a lot longer. This time, nobody had said anything for over eight months, while the queen had whined and puffed and complained of swollen feet and sickness every morning. This time, Gwen was afraid.

Not for the queen, though that was terrible, she knew. To have waited on someone for almost twenty years and not care enough about them to be worried at a time like this. Nor for the child, though that was even worse. To wish – no, she didn't wish an unborn baby dead! But Gwen knew she wished it didn't exist. For if it was a boy – if it was a boy...

Rhoop's voice seemed to echo back across the years: _"What happened to your cousins? What happened to the king?"_

If it was a boy …

Gwen could hardly bear to see Prince Caspian these days.

At least the queen was making such a big fuss these days, she didn't have much time to. And Prince Caspian was always off in his own part of the castle, anyway, well away from the queen. Just a tall, blond figure seen at a distance, with his little round tutor in constant attendance behind him. It shouldn't make her feel as sick as the queen was every morning! Not deep, cold, coiling in the pit of her stomach sick! Life shouldn't be this way!

Gwen steered her thoughts desperately away from such things, hunting for any distraction. Prince Caspian's companion – the tutor – Doctor Cornelius. He was worth a thought. He was such a funny little man. Kind, but slightly strange, with his long beard and affected little high heels, oddities of fashion and dandyism that he showed no other signs of. At least Caspian seemed truly fond of him. It was a good thing, considering how heartbroken he had been when his nurse had been sent away.

Gwen had felt as if her own heart was breaking then, to see the little sad-faced boy wandering the castle and the grounds alone. She had guessed why he spent so much time in the kennels and the stables, talking to the dogs and horses, or just standing in the orchard looking at the trees. There weren't many other trees around the castle at Beaversdam. But – what could she have done? A lady-in-waiting did not speak to the Crown Prince, nor would her having been able to tell him most of the same old stories have helped, even if she had. She would have just ended up getting sent away too. Or more likely, as a member of Telmarine aristocracy, joining her cousins on the block for treason.

So, she had done nothing. But Doctor Cornelius had come, and Prince Caspian had seemed happy again and life had gone on, until now. Gwen no longer saw him near enough to know whether or not that faintly wondering, listening expression still crossed his face, but Caspian seemed to have long since given up talking to dogs or horses or trees. The Doctor spoke well of his studies, the king spoke well of his training on the tilt yard and practise courts – or had, until everyone had stopped speaking of how the queen was.

If only it would be a girl! A girl, a Crown Princess, would be safe for everyone. Miraz would have his own heir, and she would need a husband, and no one of the ever-restless Telmarine lords would do, for the risk of giving one of them ideas and upsetting all the others. If it was a girl, there would be a royal engagement within a year, and a wedding by the time she was fourteen. While Prince Caspian would not get a choice, he would at least not get a knife in the dark. If the princess took after the queen, she would at least be pretty at first.

The Queen's voice, unhappy and whining and fussy all together, broke into Gwen's turmoil of thoughts. "That still won't do..."

Gwen closed her eyes. Maybe, maybe it would be a girl not _quite_ like her mother. Maybe, maybe. Once again, that was all she could do! Stand and watch and hope with vain hope.

Something about Gwen standing and watching on a much shorter time scale seemed to strike the still struggling and cushion-adjusting Lady Clothilde at this moment, for she pulled the cushion out yet again from under the Queen's feet, and turned to Gwen. "Can you do it?" she asked, sounding nearly as upset and plaintive as Prunaprismia.

Gwen swallowed, took the cushion and stuffed it onto the foot stool. "That should do," she said firmly to the Queen. "Now you can rest, and the Lady Berenice can go and make you a nice cup of chamomile, right away."

"Raspberry!" Prunaprismia corrected instantly. "The physician said I was to drink raspberry leaf tea! From now until – well, for the present." She frowned petulantly. "You'd forgotten!" The two other ladies-in-waiting turned matching reproachful gazes on Gwen as well. _Fancy forgetting her majesty's raspberry leaf tea …_

Gwen dropped an apologetic curtsey. "Raspberry leaf tea, of course, your Majesty."

"You can make it," said the Queen, pointing a plump finger in correction as if Gwen was the youngest of Maid Attendants. "Go!"

Gwen went. It was irritating to be told off like that, but somewhat of a relief as well to the aching jaw muscles which sought to not laugh at how completely the Queen had forgotten her ankles and the cushion on the footstool.

In the ante-chamber, Gwen shut the door and poked the fire on the hearth into life. The Queen was drinking herbal infusions so frequently at present the ladies-in-waiting had given up fetching them from the palace kitchens and were brewing them up here instead. A special little kettle hung on the crane, over the fire that was being kept going all the time. It made the room rather hot, in this late spring weather. Gwen pushed the kettle over the centre of the fire and wandered over to the window. She wished the physician had not said raspberry leaf tea from now until –

Not just because it meant not much longer now, though that too. It was just that … mares are fed raspberry leaves when there's not much longer, too. And long ago, Rhoop's first blood mare had been in foal for the first time. The mare herself had been a gift from King Caspian, and the foal she bore had been the product of a very careful mating to produce Rhoop's first trained-from-scratch war horse. Felicia had bloomed, in foal – in a way, Gwen noted wryly, that Queen Prunaprismia had not – bloomed and flourished and waddled about as proud as a peacock of her vast bulging middle and everybody from Gwen to King Caspian himself coming to pat it. She just hadn't seemed to want to part with it.

Felicia had been a few days overdue, a week overdue, ten days, two weeks … Rhoop had begun to look as if his hair would turn white with anxiety. Gwen, a very new Maid Attendant to the Queen, had plucked up her courage and consulted the royal physician. "Raspberry leaves!" she had announced triumphantly to Rhoop.

He'd stared at her. "What?"

"Raspberry leaves," Gwen had repeated. "For ladies who are, er – over – er-" She had stopped in somewhat blushing confusion at this point, because while, at seventeen, you can discuss horses in foal with a boy who's been your friend for years without any trouble, ladies in the same state are a bit more of a delicate subject.

Rhoop hadn't seemed to notice her embarrassment. He had stared at her as if this was the most wonderful piece of information in the world, and then most unexpectedly kissed her heartily on the cheek and torn off in search of raspberry leaves.

The kettle was hissing forth steam. Gwen came back to the present, poured the water over the dry raspberry leaves and carried it back to the window to stir. Ladies take their raspberry leaves infused. Felicia had liked hers neat. Lots of them. Between Rhoop and Gwen and the other six boys, they had practically stripped the castle and gardens at Beaversdam of all raspberry leaves. "We shall have to go out and collect them in the woods," Rhoop had announced finally, when Gwen had come back from a third begging expedition to the physician empty-handed. There had been a minute's difficulty there, for some reason, over whether Gwen could or could not come too. She had assumed she would; Rhoop, Bern and Revilian were quite happy with that; but Octesian had stubbornly opposed.

"The woods aren't for ladies," he'd said, again and again. Argoz and Restimar had backed him and eventually, under Octesian's curiously intense stare, Mavramorn had put his head down and joined the 'no' camp as the deciding vote. It may have been because of this that Rhoop had not called any of the other boys when Felicia chose the next morning to produce a beautiful chestnut foal. He'd sent a stable boy for Gwen. It was probably terribly unromantic to become engaged in a stable, before the limpidly interested gaze of a three hour old foal.

Gwen hadn't minded. She didn't think she minded even now. But, with everything that had happened after, it made raspberry leaves a little … sad. Sad, and somehow terrible. Or maybe that was with this present situation: waiting, waiting, afraid...

I'll wait for you, she had said the day Rhoop had gone away, promising to come back. And she had, and he had not, and – well, here life was. With the Queen drinking raspberry tea. Gwen sighed. If only – if only there was even the comfort she had found the day Rhoop had gone away, for this current tangle of fears and heartache! But _'Courage, dear heart' –_ whatever that fancied phrase of hers meant – did not apply to Prince Caspian. And she was older and wiser and much more sensible now, and for all she clung to the phrase-

Gwen's thoughts hit a stop. For all she clung to it – what?

 _Why not?_ whispered the little, fanciful voice at the back of her mind. _And why not again?_

"Again?" Gwen realised she had spoken out loud, but for that unthinking moment it had seemed the only way to arbitrate between the firm, dull, sensible voice of reason in her head and the tiny fanciful one. There were so many reasons why not, for all that just like the day Rhoop had departed, the idea of a higher power to beg to seemed extremely tempting. It was stupid, it was impossible, and either there was nothing to it and it was all a pretend, or it was rank treason which was not a wise thing to commit in the queen's ante-chamber. And Aslan was supposed to come from the east, and this window didn't look east. All in all, it was foolish – and Gwen's whirl of thought broke into a chuckle. She was one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, after all.

A vainly waiting, vainly hoping, one. Then let it be in vain!

Gwen gave the raspberry infusion a last stir, turned the sand glass to run for the two minutes the tea must steep, and pushed the window open wide. The rose garden below, a cloudless blue sky above. Everything in Telmarine Narnia was neat and in order and untroubled and quite, quite un-fanciful.

"Aslan?" Gwen whispered, barely louder than a breath. "Aslan? Whatever you are, wherever you are, if you're still there at all … oh, let it be a girl. Please, please, please. Please let it be a girl. Maybe even pretty? Please..."

There was no fancied voice in answer this time. And the time was up in the sand timer. Gwen sighed, and poured the raspberry tea into the Queen's cup. Perhaps it only worked for children. Perhaps it didn't work at all.

 _Oh, please, please..._

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 _A/N: Slightly off topic, many thanks to everyone who has reviewed "Memories." I can see there are seven of you. But owing to some hiccup in FFN's system, I cannot find out which seven of you, nor what you had to say!_

 _So, assuming no-one left a flame, thank you all very much! :)_


	3. Chapter 3

**The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter 3**

 _A/N: Be warned! Like, ANGST!_

 _~:~:~:~_

"A son!"

"A boy!"

"A fine, bonny, babe!"

Surely life, like a piece of fine Calormene porcelain, should only be able to fall into broken pieces around you once. Throughout the royal apartment, the Queen's ladies-in-waiting exclaimed and congratulated. The room was full of lady-like squealings and coo-ings and laughings – all tinkling in Gwen's ears like shattering porcelain. Queen Prunaprismia had given birth to a son.

"Red hair like his mother!"

The Queen, flushed and fat and beaming, lay back on her silken pillows and lapped up the praise.

"The image of his father!"

Miraz had been fetched the moment it was over, a smile on his normally rather grim face, while all the ladies-in-waiting curtseyed in swathes at his heavy warrior's tread through the room.

"A son! An heir!"

And the world would never be the same, never go right, again.

The sight of Lady Clothilde sobbing into a handkerchief was the final straw for Gwen. She turned sharply, and began to push in a rather unladylike manner through the milling crowd away from the high canopied bed at the centre of the congratulations. What had Clothilde to cry over?! She was young! She was pretty! She was popular with both the Queen and the King! The scrap of lace and cambric she was affectedly weeping into was a gift from the Lord Glozelle, who had been widowed last year and was on a definite look-out for someone young and pretty and popular to grace his luxurious estates! The birth of the new prince wasn't anything for her to cry over!

More by the guidance of long familiar habit than seeing, Gwen reached the ante-chamber door and squeezed herself through the narrowest opening of it she could manage. It wasn't likely – nay, be honest! No-one would notice that she, the least significant, least popular of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, had left the admiring crowd. Who was there to notice? Assuming, of course, that Prunaprismia didn't decide she needed a cushion under her feet. But she didn't really want the rest of the crowd flowing in here, to chatter and squeal and sob affectedly into handkerchiefs.

Crowds that chattered and squealed... Gwen swallowed hard. There had been another crowd that chattered and squealed, long ago. The night Prince Caspian had been born. The son! The heir! The one who would be Caspian the Tenth! Everybody had been much more anticipating that night, with none of this hanging about and saying nothing for nine months. She had been only a Maid Attendant, too inexperienced to be allowed to help much, but when it was all over, she had slipped out to find Rhoop and tell him. He hadn't needed telling, as such, or even finding. He'd been standing in that back corridor as if he'd been there for hours. At the first sight of Gwen, his face had lit up. "A boy?"

Had she even said yes? Gwen wasn't sure; only that Rhoop had caught her up as if she was as small and whisp-like as Princess Prunaprismia and whirled her around, ending with a kiss and a question. "Ours next, Gwen?"

Was that really a chivalrous way to ask if a long-standing, boy-and-girl engagement should turn into a wedding? Perhaps not, but Gwen had begun her wedding gown. She had worn it, in the end, to King Caspian's funeral.

Funeral. The ante-chamber was suddenly hot and stifling; or maybe it wasn't, because a cold finger seemed to have run down Gwen's neck – but she went over and pushed open the window. Cold night air. It was bad for babies. Gwen knew that, but her hand on the latch seemed unable to pull the window in again. Like in a dream, a nightmare, where you cannot move but only stand, trapped, your feet sunk in thick clay while all the horrors of the dark close in on you.

The funeral. That had been the first day the cold and the dark had come; the first time in all the years at court when Rhoop had not stood near her every moment that he could. He had walked off when she had gone over to him, walked off to stand among the group of the late King's older friends. They had been speaking together in low, grim-faced tones, somehow different from the sombreness appropriate to a funeral. For the first time, she had been afraid.

 _What happened to the king? What happened –_ to all of them? Treason. Giants. Stray arrows. Sea voyages. Every single one of them was gone. And now – a half-gasp tore itself from Gwen's throat. Now, for all she had stood at this window so few weeks ago and asked, what would happen to the old king's son?

 _Let it be a girl? Please, let it be a girl?_

And the answer was no? No... Gwen stared out into the darkness. It wasn't an answer of no. It wasn't anything, that was all. The queen had been carrying this son for nine months, right back to when everyone had just thought the complaints about swollen ankles were nothing more than the fatness of the queen. There was no power which could have changed that. There was no power which could change anything. There was – nothing.

Very carefully, Gwen released her grasp on the window latch. She carried on staring down into the darkness below. Somewhere down there was the rose garden, neat and orderly and laid in straight rows and bedded out with the queen's favourite roses. Neat. Ordered. One thing leading to another in simple, straightforward process. None of these fanciful imaginations. For that was all they were. Fancies. Tales. Pretty stories for the children. Life with the thorns picked off, for the very young who had yet to learn that life is neat and ordered and harsh and cruel...

For there was nothing. No-one. If there had been anyone, any substance to those foolish, treasonous, illogical old tales; then this time, surely, there would have been an answer. But there hadn't, only this last shattering of hope. And if you looked at it sensibly, honestly, there hadn't been an answer last time, either. Some fanciful phrase a foolish Maid Attendant had, in the emotional moment of parting with her fiancé and her dreams, made up and clung to all these years. As foolish as the Queen herself – if not more so!

A large brown moth with long, feathered eyebrows blundered onto the lit windowsill. Gwen crushed it savagely. There was nothing! There was no-one!

No! She forced a smile. There were the King, and the Queen, and their son.

And Prince Caspian.

Of course. There was Prince Caspian, still. Who should be warned, if it was not too late already for warnings, that the queen had had a son and hence, since this treacherous castle and court and land was all there was and there was no higher power to guide or protect his way, that he must flee.

Except there was a double guard at the door of the Queen's apartments. All night long, as the Queen's ladies-in-waiting went softly to and fro to check on the Queen and the new prince. No-one came, no-one went. In the end, Gwen gave up and slept; into the nightmare she had not known since the day Rhoop had gone away. Rhoop was falling, falling, into black waters – unless it was herself falling, falling, into the blackness where there was no-one and nothing.

The next day, there was no Prince Caspian.

And whether because everybody else knew something she did not, or whether because they knew no more than she, his name was as unspoken in the court as that of the Lion who was not real.

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	4. Chapter 4

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter 4

 _A/N: Warning! Go and find a box of paper hankies first...  
_

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It was raining. All over Narnia, cold, steady, dreary rain was falling; the kind which belongs to winter, not the month of Greenroof. At the castle at Beaversdam, the guards on the walls stood huddled up under their wet cloaks, while everyone else shivered indoors around damply smoking fires. Even in Queen Prunaprismia's apartments, the fire was declining to do much more than sulk on the hearth. Huddled ridiculously close to it for a summer's day, four ladies-in-waiting sat, sewing.

No. Gwen took half a glance up from her embroidery hoop and amended that count. Old Countess Erimon, the only member of the Royal household older than Gwen, was definitely asleep in her chair. Gwen watched the rise and fall of the old lady's breathing somewhat enviously. If you fell asleep like that, presumably you did not lie awake for hours beforehand, fearing to fall asleep. Neither would you fall into nightmares: not the old one in which she was not sure if it was herself or Rhoop falling, falling into the darkness; nor the new one, in which she hurried through a dark and tangled forest, crying after something or someone whom she could never find. Sometimes it was Rhoop, sometimes it was Prince Caspian, most often it was the Voice that had whispered _'Courage, dear heart'_.

Gwen sighed and looked down and began to undo another row of wrong stitches. From the distinctive picking sound across the hearth, Lady Clothilde was too. Why was it considered a good idea to sew while everybody's minds were elsewhere? Take the great tapestry on the main stairs, for example. It had been worked by King Caspian the Second's queen during the first Telmarine war with Archenland. For a queen whom all the history books spoke of as a great needlewoman, it contained a lot of mistakes. And as for her own piece?

Gwen pulled the last wrong loop free and began to try and set her threads and her thoughts in order. Embroidery was a good cover for thinking. Which was probably why they were all doing it – Clothilde, Berenice, herself with her tangle of thoughts. Countess Erimon's entire family on the male side had been executed for treason after Miraz had come to the throne, which was, Gwen had to assume, how she could manage to sleep.

To be old and sleep without worries? Gwen looked up at the Countess again. To be too old to have anyone to worry about? When you put it that way, it sounded terrible. Which was, of course, why she herself would probably end up that way. But for the moment – Gwen very deliberately un-threaded her needle from the red strand she had just unpicked, and drew out a yellow one instead. Red was Queen Prunaprismia and the new prince, in as far as he had any hair at all. Yellow was – Caspian. No. Gwen's mouth twisted into a slight half-corner-of-half-a-smile, and she amended that thought. _King_ Caspian.

For four very long days after the birth of the new prince, nothing had been heard of the suddenly vanished member of the royal family at all – days which had seemed even longer due to the newest member of the royal family refusing to stop wailing and fussing at all hours of the day and night. And then there had been a sudden stir through the court, a cold draught which had penetrated even as far as the hushed and tiptoe-ing realms of the Queen's apartments with its weary, dark-eye-ringed ladies-in-waiting. Prince Caspian's horse Destrier had returned.

The smile had vanished from Miraz' face. Obviously, he had not done away with his nephew. Equally obviously, his nephew had not done what Miraz had expected. That very afternoon, there was a sudden search through the castle for Doctor Cornelius. But he had vanished. Gwen's heart felt as if it had missed a beat in relief when this fact reached the Queen's apartments.

Relief didn't last long. The very next morning, Clothilde had been in un-affected tears, because Lord Glozelle had departed in command of the tracking parties to the southern woods of Narnia, without saying goodbye. The army was out the day after that, at a speed which showed Miraz must have been quietly mustering the troops ever since Caspian had vanished. The third day, the reports came back with the gallopers: the traitor had been tracked to the woods outside Beruna.

The traitor and his army.

For just as Caspian was not dead, neither was Old Narnia. Folk tales had never been approved of at the Narnian court. But tracks are tracks, and arrows are arrows, and neither seemed to have been left by Men.

Fell beasts, everyone said. But they couldn't be, Gwen protested to herself each time. They couldn't! This was Caspian they were talking about, for all anyone spoke only of the "The King's nephew" or "the traitor." And he would not – nay, could not! – have changed so much in so few weeks! That blonde, upright lad – Gwen found herself actually shaking her head. Caspian was Caspian. The birth of his cousin might have stirred him to finally challenge for the throne that was rightly his. But he could not suddenly be commanding and consorting with the foul fiends of the old stories.

The answer in the court to that, of course, was that Doctor Cornelius was a Dwarf and a traitor and a practitioner of Black Magic, and had been pouring such like evil down the Prince's ear for years, until Caspian was either bewitched or evil himself. But again – a small, stubborn voice of reason rose in Gwen's mind. The answer in the court until less than two months ago was that such things were nonsense all together; that there was nothing at all in the Black Woods, or ghosts. So, while it was true that Doctor Cornelius had probably almost certainly been a Dwarf – and how had they never noticed, with the dandified long beard and high heels that did not tally with the rest of the little earnest scholarly man? – that didn't make the rest of it true!

Evil may be fair of face. Look at Miraz, Gwen put in treacherously. But reliable judgement does not come from those whose gossiping tongues wag in every new breeze of convenient opinion. For they had been wrong, all these years; those who had said there was nothing in the woods.

Gwen suddenly realised she had been sitting, staring quite unseeing, and not at all working, at her embroidery for ages, and hastily drew a first stitch tight in the canvas. She had known that the voice of the court was wrong about the woods for ages, too. Years, in fact – all the years since Felicia and the raspberry leaves and the day the boys had not let her join the foraging expedition to the woods. Octesian and Mavramorn would not have made such a strange point of the matter if there had been nothing in the woods.

So. Gwen made herself put two more stitches carefully into her embroidery. Now there was war in the woods. Old Narnia and Caspian against Miraz and the might of Telmar. Hence, in Beaversdam, there was bad embroidery. Clothilde fretting over Lord Glozelle in Miraz's High Command; Berenice worrying about her son in the cavalry; and herself–

It was hopeless, really, if you looked at the matter plainly. Each day's dispatches made it clear that Caspian's army was generally getting the worst of it, and how could it not? Caspian was no seasoned general, with over twenty years of successfully controlling restless barons and things which weren't supposed to exist in the woods. He was a boy, and all he had for an army was the unknown of Old Narnia. There had been great anxiety in Beaversdam until it had been officially ascertained no supporting army had come to Caspian's aid from Archenland.

It hadn't, and so – well, if Old Narnia had been an army of any might, it would surely have rebelled before now, wouldn't it? Gwen sighed. None of the creatures in any of the tales she had been told had ever sounded particularly war-like. Fauns, flying horses, talking rabbits … not hardened warriors. Apart from that, what did Caspian have? Time, running out like the tedious trickling of a sand glass; and herself, watching in agonising, heart-aching slow-motion.

What good was that? A tiny flicker of laughter sprang up in Gwen's mind despite the ache. For she did, very basically, know how to use a sword. Rhoop had taught her, after one of their earliest and shortest arguments. Nine year old page boy Rhoop, newly promoted to the dignity of a sword and afternoon training sessions with it, had patronisingly stated that little girls could not have swords. Girls were not strong enough to swing them. Gwen had picked up the wooden sword in question and whacked him with it. The result had been a series of secret sword training sessions in private corners of the grounds, in exchange for her promise not to tell the other boys how Rhoop had come by the blue-black lump on his arm, nor that it had caused him to sit down and cry.

But that was long ago. Gwen swallowed very hard. Just as she had yesterday morning, reading the dispatches out to the queen, putting into awful, certain words Miraz's firm assertion that they would have the traitor dealt with by the end of the summer. How could it be otherwise? The Telmarine army worked as smoothly as silken thread slipping through canvas. And Rhoop was gone, and hope was gone, and Caspian was going...

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	5. Chapter 5

**The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter 5**

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 _A/N: This is a big chapter. You may all wish to go and find TWO boxes of tissues before starting reading … ;)_

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The moonlight was very bright. The shadows in the velvet canopy of the bed were very dark. The room was silent. It was all very strange. In the four poster bed, beneath the velvet shadows, Gwen lay awake. Exactly how many times could your life turn itself upside down and inside out?

On that point, as for everything else, the room was silent. Completely, perfectly silent. Not the least scuttle of a mouse beneath the floorboards or a sigh of the wind against the window. It was very strange. Never, in all her life, had there been such silence. Little girls sleep in a nursery and Maid Attendants sleep in a dormitory and even Ladies-in-waiting share their quarters. Now, there was only herself. No other soft breathing in the dark. Just herself, and this turned-about world.

You could count the change from the start of the war, or the birth of the prince, or back to when everyone had started saying nothing about the queen's condition. But it was probably from three nights ago. In the darkest hour, just before dawn, the entire castle of Beaversdam had been awoken by a noise. Not a war horn, such as they had occasionally heard echoing at dawn and dusk. The strangest, strangest noise: low like waters roaring but of such power it felt as if it must be heard not just all over Narnia, but in the giants' castles in the North and the Calormen palaces in the South and out to the Eastern End of the world. The queen had sat up in bed in her room and squealed. Clothilde had sat up in her bed in this room and burst into hysterical tears. Gwen had been aware of both of these, for the noise had jerked her out of the nightmare in the black tangled forest, crying after the lost Voice. She had been awake and, in fact, up before she knew it; with the oddest, oddest feeling of relief and of having been called.

It was only that she had been saved from that particular bout of nightmare, of course. Or else that her ears were getting particularly attuned to the thin, fretful first wail of the new prince, who was nearly as easily disturbed and hard to settle as his mother. That was all, Gwen had told herself sternly all day long. Nothing to give her that strange, all day long feeling that something, somewhere, had happened.

It had been a very ordinary day. The only thing which had happened had been a thing which had not happened. There had been no daily galloper back with dispatches from the army.

Really, Gwen reflected now, staring up into the blackness, it was just as well they had all had nine months practice, not mentioning the condition of the queen. Otherwise they would all have surely gone mad that day, pretending that there was nothing besides the weather and the new prince to talk of, studiously avoiding the subject of the great noise and the absent messenger.

It had been a very ordinary day, ending with Clothilde sniffling herself to sleep and Gwen lying awake, listening to it until she could not help falling asleep, into the nightmares. Then, something had been different. Somewhere in the black, tangled forest, the Voice, the lost Voice which had once said _'Courage, dear heart,'_ had spoken.

She could not make out the words. But the Voice had spoken.

The next morning, ordinary stopped at breakfast. The queen had taken to having her breakfast in bed, since the prince had arrived, and Gwen had been waiting on her, when there had been a loud and urgent hammering on the door. "That will be the dispatches," Prunaprismia had commanded abruptly, in the middle of a mouthful – yet another, then, who had been pretending they were not thinking madly about the war and the army and all. "Fetch them in."

Gwen had accordingly answered the renewed hammering, to find a very young and anxious guardsman clutching a packet of letters. The guards at Beaversdam had been reduced to a fairly motley collection, as most of the normal soldiers had gone away with the army. It was one of the anxious young cadets at the door, rather than one of the formerly-retired grey-heads. Gwen's attention had been too engaged with the unusual seal and writing on the packet to notice how very much more than normally anxious he seemed.

"Read!" Prunaprismia had tossed out, returning to her boiled egg and toast. "Get on with it!"

At the imperious tone of this last command, Gwen had swallowed the comment she had been about to make, regarding the perfectly strange seal to the packet, and broken it open. Read, and get on with it!

" _To the people of Telmar within the land of Narnia..."_

Many miles away, she had heard herself trailing to a halt. It was not the dispatches.

It was a proclamation – a proclamation in the Name of Aslan, the Great Lion, the Son of the Emperor Over the Sea. By His command, Caspian was King. Narnia henceforth belonged to the Talking Beasts and Dwarves and Dryads and Fauns as much as the Men. All who wished to stay might apparently do so; those who did not might have a new home and must present themselves to Aslan at the Ford of Beruna in five days time.

Each word had slammed into Gwen's mind like a blow.

"Aslan?" Now, in the silent dark, her lips whispered the name again as they had there in the Queen's chamber, inaudible with sudden dryness. "Aslan?"

The Lion whom she had said did not exist – did, after all? And not just as a – a Power over the Sea, off beyond the Eastern End of the world? Real, and in Narnia? In, of all places, the humdrum market town of Beruna?

Of course. Old Narnia was real, here and now. So too was its Lion. In the black, tangled forest the lost Voice had spoken.

Aslan, the Lion, the Son of the Emperor Over the Sea, the One Who was at the back of all the stories, the One Who had come to the Hundred Years Winter to save His people – had come to save them yet again.

And – Gwen had run one finger gently over the name with a slow feeling of a great chasm of numbness opening up and swallowing her – Caspian was King. Caspian … the boy who had not stopped believing … who had fled to the True Narnia … but how?

How? In the distant background, the queen had been demanding what the matter was, but Gwen had not answered, numbly skimming through the other letter enclosed with the proclamation. _To Prunaprismia, aunt of our trusty and well-beloved Caspian, King of Narnia and Emperor of the Lone Islands, the tenth of his name, formerly Lady Protectress, now styling herself Queen of Narnia..._

Gwen had not managed to take in all the careful and courtly language, but the facts stood out amongst it. _A single combat had been wagered … and Miraz had taken it … and been slain by his own lords … the truce had been broken … battle had followed … the Telmarine army had surrendered … and had been incarcerated in Beruna town. The letter's author presented King Caspian's assurances of goodwill towards his aunt and cousin and the rest of the Telmarine court … offered condolences to her on her personal loss … and, regretting that this was of small consolation, presented his own assurance that the act of treachery by Lord Glozelle had been repaid by the own hand of Peter,_ _by the gift of Aslan, by election, by prescription and by conquest,_ _High King_ _over all Kings in_ _Narnia,_ _Emperor of the Lone Islands and Lord of Cair Paravel,_ _Knight of the most Noble Order of the Lion._

Looking back now, Gwen could still not see quite what she should have done, faced with all this and the need to impart it to the queen, but she could see that what had happened had not been ideal.

"What is it?" Prunaprismia had repeated in what had probably been a justifiable tone of impatience.

Gwen's mind had stalled for words. Prunaprismia had made a small, very unladylike noise. "You _are_ useless! Pass it here!"

Gwen had passed it. The queen had promptly had hysterics.

A sort of cloud of grey numbness was all her memory supplied for the following few minutes. The queen's shrieks had brought the rest of the ladies-in-waiting in waiting and they, it seemed to Gwen, had one and all joined in the hysterics. No, that was not quite true. Clothilde had screamed, exactly once, like a rabbit in a snare. Then she had fainted dead away. Gwen had been working away in a combination of franticness and frustration to bring her round, when she had noticed the young guardsman hovering at her elbow.

"No!" she had snapped. "You can't help!"

"But-"

"No!"

"But your Ladyship," he had objected stubbornly. "I need the Queen to speak to the centaurs about surrendering the castle!"

Many, many things of similar earth-shaking, un-Telmarine absurdity had been said in the castle of Beaversdam since, but Gwen still felt that impossible request stood at the pinnacle of all. The Queen? To speak to a centaur? At any time? Let alone a group of them, right then? Gwen had looked round at the wailing huddle of queen and ladies-in-waiting in despair, and most unexpectedly met the eye of Countess Erimon – bright, alert, and highly disapproving of the sobbing scenes before her. The Countess had raised one hand, far more imperious with lady-like dignity than Prunaprismia could ever be, and gestured between Gwen and the guard.

"You go!" she had mouthed. "And quickly!"

And so she, Gwen, nothing more than the queen's longest serving, least liked lady-in-waiting, had gone down to the gates and surrendered the Royal Castle of Beaversdam to a deputation of centaurs sent by His Majesty King Caspian.

Centaurs. In Beaversdam. In this most neat and orderly and unfanciful heart of the neat and orderly and unfanciful realm of Telmarine Narnia, there were centaurs. At any other time, Gwen felt, they might have been startling, or at least incongruous, but the only feeling which had come then had been, under the numbness, an odd sense of sadness. For she had surrendered the keys with due and solemn formality as a defeated Telmarine. The centaurs had accepted the keys with due and solemn formality as representatives of the victorious Narnian king. The young guard tagging at her heels had stepped forwards with the enthusiasm of barely fourteen. "I say!" he had said. "Does this mean all those tales are real?! And Prince Caspian will be coming back?!"

Now, in the silent darkness, the sadness squeezed itself out into a sudden welling of tears in her eyes. Gwen blinked them away. All the years … and somehow she had ended up old, and on the wrong side.

But that was life, and entirely by the by. Old, and on the wrong side, all that day she and the Countess Erimon had somehow held the fort. Not in a defending the castle sort of way, at all. No, in an everyday way – keeping the castle running and the infant prince fed and tended and still meeting each of the envoys and dealing with the vast political swirlings of a civil war ending and a new monarch – and government – and world – stepping into the place of the old one. The widowed queen declined to do anything other than sob and wail. The rest of the ladies-in-waiting joined her in that, like a flock of mourning doves – all except Countess Erimon.

You would never have thought that the old lady who fell asleep over her embroidery had such capability and organisation about her. But then, Gwen conceded, no-one would really have expected her to answer as the regent of the House of Telmar either. The guards – such as were left – had deserted; the kitchen staff had deserted; the lower workings of the court had fled like birds from a slowly felled tree, and with each new change it seemed as if she or Countess Erimon had metaphorically locked the door after it and walked back up those all-too-not metaphorical dozens of stairs to tell the other one, in the ante-chamber of the queen's apartments. Night had come, and a small body of dwarves and badgers and centaurs had arrived, sent with His Majesty's command to stand guard over his castle. After that, Gwen had slept, dozing upright in a chair as Countess Erimon had been wont to do. She didn't think the Countess herself had slept at all. Certainly, she had been awake the last thing Gwen could remember, and had been calmly arranging a sort of pot-luck breakfast when Gwen had awoken.

The breakfast itself had been a bit of a waste. The queen had refused to eat, and no-one else had seemed to have any more appetite. But then, Clothilde sniffing and hiccuping afresh did not really make stale pasties and old bread with an inadequate scraping of butter any more palatable. Gwen had been somewhat relieved when a fresh summons to the gate had enabled her to abandon the pretence of eating. It had been another letter, this time a simple notification that the King and retinue would, Aslan willing, be arriving at the castle about an hour after noon.

Prunaprismia had not had hysterics – quite. She had simply arisen and announced with hysterical dignity that _she_ was not staying to be turned out of her home and castle by a rabble of brigands and murderers! They would start for Beruna at once!

There had followed the wildest half-hour, for Prunaprismia had, apparently, meant exactly at once. Even Clothilde had aroused from her sobbing little heap to tear about and try and delay the queen, while gathering the absolute basics for travelling with an under three month old infant. Up, down, round about, cloaks to be fetched from the wardrobes, the one remaining older guardsman and his two sons to be alerted to have whatever horses were still in the stables made ready... Gwen had come hurrying back from one of these errands to find that the queen, in travelling cloak, had progressed as far as the now empty Great Hall.

Prunaprismia had pointed one little plump finger at her. "Why aren't you ready?"

The question was over-loud in the quiet Hall. The most complete and utter silence had followed it, as smothering as the silence Gwen lay in now. And she and Prunaprismia had stood there, and looked at each other: one tall, one short; one bone-y, one fat. In her mind's eye, Gwen could see the scene as though she had been a bystander, quite apart from the two facing each other or the ladies-in-waiting standing behind Prunaprismia, each one with their mouths puckered into little shocked 'O's. _Fancy not being ready when the Queen was..._

" _Because,"_ the Gwen of tonight could hear the Gwen of this morning saying, _"I'm not coming."_

Gwen wasn't quite sure where the words had come from. She hadn't thought them, there hadn't been time to think of anything, that morning, after the letter arrived. And between Prunaprismia's hysterics and coping with everything else the day before, she hadn't given any further thought to that proclamation then, either. But the matter was suddenly definite, and as Prunaprismia's mouth joined those of the ladies-in-waiting in dropping open, Gwen had repeated herself.

"I'm not coming."

For a moment, Gwen had thought it was the fact of what she had said which had shocked Prunaprismia. But it was only the existence of opposition.

"We're going away now," the little fat and foolish woman before her had commanded. "Hurry up and get your cloak!"

Going away … the two words had swirled strangely through Gwen's mind, searching for the echo of memory they were sure they had once had … and Rhoop's voice came back, out of that tangled forest. Rhoop, the last day she had seen him, the last time they had spoken, that fugitive, treasonous parting on the stairs:

" _...I am going away that – that it won't be with me as with your cousins..."_

Rhoop...

Some vast, deep anger had flared up in Gwen. "Your man!" she had snapped back into Prunaprismia's face. "Your man sent mine into exile! To cover up his own black treason! And I'm sorry if it surprises you, but that does not inspire me to follow his widow into exile, now he's met his own two-faced friend's knife in the back! So I am not coming! I have promised to wait here, and I will keep that promise! And before you say I have promised anything as a lady-in-waiting, let me remind you! That was to the Crown! To King Caspian!"

She had bobbed a brief, sarcastic curtsey. "Good-bye, your _Ladyship._ You will have to learn to put cushions under your own feet. Or put up with the botched job the rest of them are capable of doing!"

The rest of them. With a final glare at the still gaping Prunaprismia, Gwen had stepped past and marched along that long line of ladies-in-waiting. They had all stared, face after face of round, popping eyes and dropped jaws. Fat, foolish and fawning, every one of them! Except at the end of the line was Countess Erimon.

Gwen had stopped abruptly. She hadn't managed to put it into words, but Countess Erimon hadn't needed the question in words. She had met Gwen's eye and smiled, a small, dignified smile: "What is there to stay in Narnia for?"

" _What is there to stay in Narnia for?"_ Gwen echoed the question into the darkness. She had walked out of the Great Hall; she had gone back up to the empty Queen's Apartments that had belonged to three successive queens in her lifetime; she had wandered aimlessly between the silent rooms and heard the clatter of Prunaprismia's party riding off and the silence falling after it. Somewhere, up there, her wild anger had burned out, leaving only the memory of the look in Countess Erimon's eyes, and her question.

What is there to stay in Narnia for?

Gwen ran her fingers restlessly up and down the edge of the coverlet. Perhaps falling into endless nightmares of tangled forests was easier than the tangle of wakeful life. At least then you could wake from them, as she had woken only this morning, in the chair, to find Countess Erimon arranging breakfast. Not old, feeble and ever dozing. Surprisingly sprightly and capable – especially for someone living in a world falling down around their ears.

Where was the Countess now? Still in Narnia, at any rate. Somewhere in Beruna. But why? In a sort of ancient, pointless partisanship, following the widow and son of the man who had executed her sons as traitors, rather than stay and serve the son of the man who had sent her husband to his death on Ettinsmoor? Gwen considered. Was that all she herself had stayed for? Because Caspian the Ninth had been good to his young companion Rhoop, and Miraz had killed him? No. Gwen shook her head against the pillow. If you were going to look at it in logical, human terms like that, she had stayed far more for the sake of the moment's petty, vindictive spite in contradicting Prunaprismia, in not going just because _her ladyship_ had assumed Gwen was.

That had been petty. Gwen sighed again. Prunaprismia had been queen. She hadn't usurped the throne, and she could hardly have stopped Miraz doing it. And before that, she had been quite legitimately a princess by marriage. She ought to have addressed Prunaprismia as Your Majesty.

You couldn't imagine Countess Erimon doing anything pettishly or vindictively. So she must have wanted to go with Prunaprismia, however dull or dutiful the want. Was she grateful to the queen and Miraz? Grateful for her own life – all these years at the court as a sort of not-quite-hostage? Or grateful that her sons had been given the swift, sure deaths accorded to traitors, not the raving, marsh-fevered end of their father, or the lingering fates of the others Miraz had disposed of – incarceration or poison or banishment beyond the edge of the world?

Gwen tried to imagine being grateful to Prunaprismia. It was impossible. There was just nothing in the ex-queen to be grateful _TO_ , never mind finding anything to be grateful for. Fat, foolish, vacant, petty – of course, Countess Erimon would not have seen her like that. Not the everyday, niggling, you-haven't-changed-since-we-were-little, way. With the age gap, it was more like herself being grateful to Prince Caspian. And that was –

Gwen sighed. That was possible. That was, in fact, pathetically probable. She would end up just like Countess Erimon. Without the dead family, of course. But the same: the old lady at the back of the court; quiet, dignified, nothing-ish; pathetically and dutifully devoted to the monarch; the one whom everyone wonders why she's there, while the young belles whisper to each other that they will never, never be as old and dull and unremarkable as the Lady Gwen.

Perhaps that was why Countess Erimon had gone. To get away from the places where the young belles had whispered; to not stay and face happy, carefree, triumphant youth. Like that young guardsman. Every day, bumping into reminders that you were old and from the wrong side. Every day, seeing that which you had lost forever …

 _What had she stayed for?_

The King. There was still Prince Caspian, as she had said to herself all those months ago when Prunaprismia had first started wanting to put her feet up incessantly. Except he was the king, now. And of the others she had hunted through the dark and tangled forest for, the Voice was lost to her. In the dream, it had spoken, but she had not been able to catch the words. And Rhoop-?

She was sorry, really, that she had spoken of him to Prunaprismia. Rhoop and the other boys – and that was a silly thing to call them now – were long forgotten. As happens to those who are long dead. It was a shame to have raked them up in anger, a foolish flaunting of a lost hope. Perhaps that was what Countess Erimon had meant to say to her. Not so much an explanation of her own actions, as a reminder of reality to a younger lady-in-waiting who had obviously lost her temper. What is there to stay in Narnia for?

With a stab of sudden impatience, Gwen sat up and pushed the heavy velvet bedspread aside. She might not have the answer for that one, but if you absolutely cannot get to sleep, there is certainly nothing to stay in bed for.

She would go for a walk in the gardens.

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	6. Chapter 6

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: chapter 6

 _A/N: At last! At very, very long last, here be lions!_

 _The plot bunnies are supplying paper hankies free as needed :)_

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Outside, the moonlight was even brighter. The gardens were empty and silent. As they should be at this hour of the night, Gwen reminded herself. Everyone who had desired to sleep in the castle was safely in bed therein, and everyone who had not wished to sleep in the Telmarine castle was safely encamped outside. Everyone was asleep. Apart from herself.

Gwen looked down at her feet to sigh, and then smiled a little instead. Even the daisies in dew wet grass were asleep, petals folded tightly shut. Daisies...

She had made a chain of daisies picked from the lawns of this castle, once. When she had been six years old and fallen out of the apple tree onto Rhoop. All the next morning she had laboured away, scouring the generally well-kept lawns to make a great long chain, which she had then presented to Rhoop as the Queens of the Tournaments did, "For Valour!"

He hadn't even minded – or if he had, she hadn't noticed at the time. He'd held it carefully where she'd put it in his hands, and then said "Knights give the favours they win to their ladies. Bend your head down a bit."

She'd worn that lop-sided daisy crown all the rest of the day, and shed tears over its final demise into dust at the bottom of a wooden jewellery casket sometime aged about sixteen.

The smile ended in a sigh, after all. Gwen traced a circle in the dew, and went on. It was so very, very quiet. Of course, night always was – but when the moonlight was almost as bright as morning, you somehow expected everywhere to sound like morning, too.

It had been very quiet in the gardens this morning. She had carried on rattling around those empty, echoing rooms of the Queen's apartments until long after the noise of Prunaprismia's raggle-tag cavalcade had died away. Just wandering, restlessly, from room to room, back and back again to the window in the ante-chamber which looked out on the rose garden. And then, quite suddenly, almost sheer terror at the silence and the emptiness had seized her; the sense of being alone, alone, completely alone and marooned while everyone else sailed on!

Gwen stopped her moonlit pacing and ran her fingers through the box hedge which lined the path, to reassure herself against the echo of that wild panic that she might find herself locked in and abandoned for ever. It had been as if the dark and tangled forest had finally caught up with her, escaped from the night-time and the nightmare to become as real as the Voice she had called after – and she had literally fled down the long flights of stairs and out into the gardens.

They had been silent, empty, but at least they had been in light and leaf, not bare and black and tangled. Gwen could not recall, now, exactly where she had wandered, up one path and down the next, only that she had eventually found herself in the orchards. Just standing, in fact. Not even walking, simply standing there and listening to the silence.

There had been no wind. She was quite certain of that – just as it had been quite certain that there had suddenly been a stir and a rustling through the trees. Louder and louder they had rustled, the branches tossing as in a gale, and then there had come the far-off sound of trumpets. Not a war horn, not hunting calls, but the strident fanfare of a king returning in triumph from a war.

 _Aslan willing … about an hour after noon..._ For the second time that day Gwen had found herself hurrying, hurrying, almost running through the gardens. Somebody, somebody had to be there to greet King Caspian the Tenth on his return to the castle of his fathers.

She had not been alone in the castle, after all. There were the group of centaurs and fauns and dwarves who had been sent the previous night, of course; Gwen had quite forgotten those. But she was not the only Telmarine, either. There was the young guard cadet who had brought the letters yesterday; his older brother; a pair of kitchen girls Gwen vaguely recollected as being orphaned; and the boys' father. As he had grumbled to Gwen while they stood, a small, odd group outside the gates listening to the nearing trumpets and drumming of hooves, he was only staying because he had promised his wife to take care of the boys after she had died, so he couldn't go away and leave them with all these-

Here the sentence had finished as abruptly as if the large chestnut centaur beside him had stepped on it.

"You would want to see His Majesty return," Gwen had put in as quickly as she could. Half a day's distant acquaintance with centaurs didn't give you much experience to judge whether the rather tense silence was nasty or not.

The old guardsman had taken half a glance over his shoulder, looked sheepish at having done so, and then muttered "About time."

He had had no time to say more; Gwen had had no more time to marvel over the amount of silent treason that had apparently been rife in Miraz' court; for at that very moment the centaurs had all stirred, and the kitchen girls had gasped, and the two guard cadets had flung up their hats with a cheer. "The King! The King!"

The King, indeed. It had probably not been a huge cavalcade that had wound its way into sight, but when it was made up of such a vast mix of unfamiliar creatures one had only ever heard mentioned, with little description, in childhood stories, it seemed a huge crowd. Dwarves, fauns, centaurs, satyrs, dryads – all flocking around a central group on horseback, at the head of which had been Caspian. King Caspian. Gwen had thought it to herself so often in all the weeks of the war, yet it had still been something of a shock to find that it was true. The young Prince was gone: it was a King who swung down off his horse and took the salutes of his advance guard and the cheers of his entourage and the tiny welcome of the group of stayed-behind Telmarines at the gate.

And then the cheers and cap-doffings and curtseys had finished – and the five other Telmarines had all looked at Gwen. It had felt, in fact, as if the entire entourage had been looking at her. In the one moment's horrible silence, it had dawned on Gwen that by the strange rule of precedence which made a Lady-in-waiting who spent her days sewing and putting cushions under the queen's feet decidedly more important than a guardsman who protected the castle and infinitely more important than a kitchen maid who peeled the potatoes to feed them all, she was the one who had to speak.

It hadn't helped that her first and overwhelming thought had been a wild wish that Countess Erimon had not left, because then she, not Gwen, would have been the one responsible for explaining that Prunaprismia wasn't there.

She couldn't remember now quite what she'd managed to stammer out: only that Caspian had not looked in the least surprised; and that a young man with a bitten lip had come through the parting crowd and laid a hand briefly on the King's shoulder. "I'm sorry," he'd said softly.

Caspian had shaken his head very slightly in reply. A gaze of understanding of some kind had passed between the two, but before Gwen had managed to find somewhere else to look, Caspian had turned and smiled at her. "Your Ladyship, His Majesty King Edmund from the Golden Age."

King Edmund. Gwen stopped her walk along the moonlit path. It was still, even a whole afternoon and evening later, completely bewildering. For it hadn't only been King Edmund. Queen Lucy. Queen Susan. High King Peter. The four monarchs of the Golden Age. All four of them had made their way through the crowd of bowing Narnians to join King Caspian. All four of them very much real. All four of them not the age at which the old tales said they had left Narnia, but Caspian's age; or in the case of Queen Lucy, younger than him. All four of them, at this very moment, asleep in the castle.

Gwen was glad, for Caspian's sake, that Their Majesties were his age – but it made her feel even older than she had with the two guard cadets. Old, and horribly, horribly alone. For with the Old Narnians and especially with Their Majesties had come, not Aslan Himself, but the living, breathing reality of Him in their words and thoughts and faces. If there had been some strange golden dignity she had not met before in Caspian's face, it was almost as nothing compared to the shining joy that simply radiated from Queen Lucy. Not for them the lost wandering in the tangled forest. Not for them the nagging, nagging question, 'What is there to stay in Narnia for?'

Queen Susan had had a much more pressing concern. She had come up to Gwen after lunch. "Have you anything we could change into? We've been wearing these things for days, and the boys have fought a battle in theirs-"

"Caspian says he has," Queen Lucy had put in, appearing suddenly beside her sister. "And his stuff should fit Peter-"

"So it will just be Lucy and Edmund and I," Queen Susan had finished. "The three of us. And some things for the Dwarves and Beasts, of course."

The three of us.

And the Dwarves and Beasts.

Of course.

Of all the absurd things which had been uttered in Beaversdam since the first letter had arrived, that one was almost on a par with the idea of Prunaprismia speaking to an envoy of centaurs. But there it was, and like dealing with the centaurs, whatever it was which ruled the fates of ladies-in-waiting had arranged that Gwen must be the one to deal with it.

Not that it had been, really, a very disagreeable afternoon unpacking the glories of the royal wardrobes at Beaversdam for their Majesties. Odd, but somehow wonderfully enjoyable. There had been so much stuff which Prunaprismia, with her liking for the fussy and the frilly, had never used: silks and velvets and cloth-of-gold, in every colour of the rainbow. King Edmund had borne it with a sort of patient resignation, but the two – Queens, Gwen corrected hastily over the original thought of 'girls'. For they were both queens, in a way Prunaprismia had never, never been, nor ever could have been. Gracious and dignified and majestic, and yet at the same time, they were girls, laughing and exclaiming and rejoicing over the clothes and fabrics with a happiness that was unavoidably infectious.

If it hadn't been for the thought of the Lion, Gwen felt she had never spent a happier afternoon since – well, for a long time.

But the thought had been there, all the time, no matter how she had pushed it away; the Voice that she could not make out in the tangled forest; as much of a barrier between her and the happiness as the barrier between a lady-in-waiting and three monarchs, or her age and their youth. The latter two hadn't even seemed to occur to them, it had seemed to Gwen as she fetched and measured and pinned up. It felt as if they were counting her almost one of them – a feeling Queen Lucy had suddenly confirmed as Gwen was pinning a velvet sleeve into place over the white silk blouse the young queen had settled on.

"I _am_ glad you've stayed," Queen Lucy had said frankly.

It was not a sentiment the training of a Maid Attendant or Lady-in-waiting covered a response to. Gwen had been obliged to take refuge in the fact that her mouth was full of pins and utter a sort of appreciative hum.

Queen Lucy hadn't seemed to mind. She had simply carried on smiling as radiantly as she had done since she had appeared beside Caspian at the castle gate. And Gwen, forgetting her position and herself and the nagging question of what she was doing here and everything else, had smiled back through the mouthful of pins. And then the happiness had come crashing down, and the tangled forest rushed up to replace it, for Queen Lucy had asked the question.

"Have you met Aslan?"

 _Had she met Aslan?_

Some of the pins had fallen on the floor. Gwen had had to get down and rescue them. "Er- No. Your Majesty."

 _She had not met Aslan. The old whisper of comfort and courage would hardly have counted any time, compared to what Queen Lucy meant, but now the Voice was lost within the tangled forest..._

It could only, really, have been seconds, in which the silence had dragged on and on, for Queen Susan had vanished into the ante-chamber to try on a different gown, which couldn't have taken her several hours, and King Edmund had been whistling softly under his breath by the window, and he definitely had only gone from one note to the next. But it had seemed like forever, that she had knelt on the floor and kept looking for the last pin, that hadn't actually been dropped at all.

"You'll have to come with us!"

What?

"You'll have to come with us!" Queen Lucy repeated eagerly. "Aslan's sent for everybody to go to Beruna, in four days time. You'll be able to meet Him, then."

She must have found the last pin, for Gwen had become aware that she had scrambled to her feet, shaking her head. "Oh no, no, I couldn't. No."

"No?" For the second time that day, a queen had seemed surprised by Gwen's answer; for the second time a pair of puzzled blue eyes had stared up at her. But this time, the queen had seemed to care about the answer. "Why ever not?"

Perhaps, Gwen reflected, if Prunaprismia had shown that much concern for her longest-standing lady-in-waiting, she would not have been here at all, wandering about the castle gardens in the moonlight. She would have been in Beruna, safely allied with Countess Erimon, waiting to go away to some land where there was no lost Voice, no Lion, no great aching burden of shame and loss and fear. No unintentionally accusing queens, their faces shining but their eyes puzzling, trying to understand why you would not want to meet Aslan.

It hurt, even out here in the gardens, it hurt: the memory of Queen Lucy's face as she had repeated "Why ever not?"

The quick, simple answer should have been that she would be too busy. There was a castle to be run, with only herself and two kitchen maids to do it. Or that even in less straitened times, ladies-in-waiting were not supposed to go gadding about. But both of those were too quick and too simple – or something like that, for Gwen had found herself quite unable to say them. She had looked down, and gone on staring at the pins in her hands, staring and staring while the silence had grown ever more terrible.

"I- I think I would be afraid to," she had managed to mumble out in the end.

"Afraid?"

Queen Lucy had looked even more puzzled at that, but at the window, King Edmund's whistle had suddenly broken off. "If anyone can look Aslan in the face without their knees knocking together, they're either braver than most or just plain silly."

It had sounded as if he was about to say more, but at that moment, Queen Susan had danced back in, a vision of loveliness in green, with an armful of mulberry velvet that she flourished as "Just the thing for you, Ed!" In King Edmund's boyish protests, the matter had been dropped, for which Gwen was uncomfortably glad – and sorry – at the same time.

She stopped yet again, this time in the shadows of the hedge that bordered the orchards. If this walk had been meant to make her tired enough to sleep, it wasn't succeeding. But if it was just meant to pass the time – well, she was managing that. And at least here there were no fretful babies and no Clothilde sniffing and sobbing-

Just a world she didn't belong in. A world which had seen Aslan.

 _Aslan! Aslan! Aslan!_

Her own voice from all those years ago seemed to come back out of the dark as a kind of mocking echo. Gwen buried her face in her hands and fled from it.

Anywhere, anywhere. If you were not looking, the castle grounds at Beaversdam were as wild and tangled as the tangled forest of the nightmares, but Gwen simply stumbled onwards. Anywhere, anywhere, through the silver glare of the moonlight and the dappled shadow beside hedges and the thick blackness beneath trees, and round a corner into a patch where the light showed through her fingers covering her eyes not silver, but golden.

Golden? Gwen stopped.

Not the moon. Not firelight. Only a Lion.

The Lion. The Great Lion, in the castle gardens of Beaversdam. The gardens which had, all Gwen's life, been neat and orderly and entirely free of lions. But it could not be a dream. In no dream could there be Him – greater and more golden and more terrible than anything in any of her nightmares. Neither could you be so very, very afraid; as King Edmund had said, such that your knees knocked together. Perhaps, in a dream, you might feel a sudden, desperate longing not to be so afraid, to be like Queen Lucy. But even in the stupidest dream she had ever had, Gwen was certain she could not have managed to say anything as stupid and abrupt and inexplicable as she did:

"Should I go?"

Aslan's great, unblinking gaze rested on her, and then He spoke, His voice somehow both deep and gentle: "Why should you go, Daughter of Eve?"

Because He was the Great Lion of the Narnians and she was a Telmarine? Because she was a lady-in-waiting and they usually get out of the way when they have interrupted a superior ranking person's private walk in the gardens? Because most of Prunaprismia's ladies-in-waiting would have long since shrieked and run on meeting a lion in the gardens, never mind a Talking one? Gwen's mind, for a moment, was not at all helpful. But none of those were the answer.

The answer was far simpler, and more terrible. "I gave up."

He waited in silence. A huge, vast lump of disappointment at herself came into Gwen's throat. Still He waited.

"I-I gave u-up," Gwen repeated, because something seemed to need to be said, and she couldn't sort anything else out. It was no good to protest that she had never seen Him before. Prince Caspian and Doctor Cornelius and all the army of Old Narnia had never seen Aslan either, before two days ago. They hadn't given up and said there were no such things as Talking Lions or that He couldn't possibly still be alive and powerful now, had they? Caspian's old Nurse hadn't seen Him, and yet she had still taught Caspian about Aslan, with those old stories. Stories which she, Gwen, had known too – and nor did it make any difference to say that all those about her had firmly and constantly dismissed them as fairy tales or treason. She had had enough common sense to recognise when something is being said so firmly and constantly that the say-er thereof knows it is not true. The whole Telmarine court had firmly and constantly said Miraz was the rightful king, hadn't they?

Right now, standing in the golden light of the Lion, that seemed a minute grain of usurpation compared to that of saying the Great Lion did not and had never existed. And even if everybody had said it, every moment of the day, and she had never heard the stories – she had still had the world, hadn't she? The grounds around the castle might have tried to pretend that all was lion-free and made by a king named Caspian – but there had still been the sky overhead? Nobody in Telmarine Narnia had ever offered any explanation for the stars, let alone one equal to the Great Lion singing them into being on the morning the world was made.

"I-I – knew," Gwen managed to get out past the aching lump. "I d-did, a-and I a-asked, a-a-and th-then I-I-I gave up." She took another huge swallow to try and control the quaver. "I said You didn't exist." Still the waiting silence. Or maybe it wasn't really a waiting silence at all, but a simply final one that waited for her to go.

Go, that was it. Get her things from the castle and go after Prunaprismia and the other ladies-in-waiting. And it would be just like the day long ago when Gwen had hurried in late with watery eyes and a red nose that had had nothing to do with tears and everything to do with Rhoop's blood mare Felicia having raised her head from grazing rather suddenly. Prunaprismia would sniff scornfully and point one little fat finger at Gwen, and say so everyone could hear: " _You've_ been crying!" Only this time it would be tr-

"Why will you give up?"

 _Will? Will?_ Gwen's line of memories ended in a shocked gulp. _Why_ _ **will**_ _you give up?_ As if – she hadn't, already?

"Do you still not believe I Am?"

Gwen vaguely registered that her mouth was hanging open in a most unladylike fashion. "B-but I do," she fumbled out. "I mean – You're there."

Again, He was waiting; and again, the huge lump of disappointment rose to choke her, so badly this time that the tears came to her eyes quite unstoppably. Because – He always had been there. In all of this. The answer hadn't been 'No', at all. It had been something better, for Caspian and for all Narnia. Not 'no', but 'Wait', have patience, have-

"Courage, dear heart."

He said it; not a whisper in her mind or her own murmuring of it; but three simple words in a voice so vastly deep and golden and – _caring –_ Gwen caught at her desperate sobs and looked up again into those great unblinking eyes.

"But – Aslan – I knew – enough to know I knew, really, I mean."

He went on looking at her, while Gwen felt as she would sink into the ground in shame. "A-and s-s-o-o..." she stammered on, "I-I-"

"What did you know, Daughter of Eve?"

The question was no less deep, no less golden – but somehow a trifle sterner, that checked Gwen's stutters into another desperate gulp. "You made the world," she blurted hastily, catching hold of the nearest fact as her mind stumbled over the oddity of the question. "On the first day."

Gwen blushed. Of course, it could hardly have been earlier. "And an evil witch came," she continued, trying to be a little more coherent. "So You had the Tree planted to protect Narnia. But the Tree was lost, and the Great Winter came. So You sent the four children, but one of them was lost, so You came…"

She trailed off. King Edmund. The boy with the bitten lip and the kingly face and the objection to mulberry velvet.

Aslan was still looking at her. Gwen wrenched her mind back, and forced her lips to carry on. "And – and You died to save Edmund and–"

She had been going to say 'all Narnia,' just like the stories did. But the point of Aslan's question and the direction of this recital suddenly dawned in her mind. Also that apparently every single one of the Prunaprismia's ladies-in-waiting was foolish, if not fat.

"Aslan? Do you mean it was for me too? For my giving up? Even before I knew of You? I mean, even before I was around to know of You?"

He didn't answer in words; He simply stepped forwards to be for the first time within Gwen's reach. And she buried her face and tears in that golden, golden mane and asked a question which seemed to have been already rather answered in this conversation.

"Aslan? Could I – could I stay?"

~:~:~

 _To be continued... :)_


	7. Chapter 7

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter 7

 _A/N: I think I have rewritten this chapter five times. But here you are at last. And it is so nice to be home in Narnia again. The plot bunnies are standing free lemonade for anybody who likes, to celebrate :)_

 _~:~:~_

Once again, there was a crowd that chattered and squealed. Once again, Gwen found herself pushing and squeezing her way through it. But this wasn't a crowd the least bit like the last one, the night Miraz' son had been born. It wasn't even very much like the longer ago crowd when Prince Caspian had been born. Neither of those had been such a mix of people: dwarves and badgers and fauns and centaurs and humans, all happily muddled together. The human contingent, Gwen noted, was predominantly young. Most of the Telmarine youth seemed to have been delighted to find the old Tales about Talking Beasts were, in fact, true. Friendships that would have been unbelievable a year ago flowed past in the crowd: a little, blond haired girl chatting to a motherly Talking Hedgehog; a chain-mailed guard cadet in earnest conversation with a centaur. This was a crowd of Narnians, the terms Old and New rendered meaningless in restoration. Close to that lay the other difference to those chattering crowds of the past.

In no Telmarine gathering had the Name of the Lion nor even His very existence been mentioned. Let alone so frequently and joyfully.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight. Just as the old histories said. And they were histories, not stories. They were true. Much more true than the Telmarine histories, especially.

Gwen smiled, and gathered the velvet skirts of her best gown yet a little closer. It was probably already a vain effort to get them through this crowd uncrushed, but she wasn't giving up just yet. As the chief of His Majesty King Caspian the Tenth's ladies-in-waiting, she had a certain duty to be lady-like. Which included reaching her place among the seats reserved for members of the court at his majesty's coronation in a relatively un-dishevelled state.

A long-legged marsh-wiggle and a Bulgy bear moved slowly into Gwen's path. She paused to let them pass. It was not yet a month since she had opened the packet of letters that had not been the dispatches, in Prunaprismia's chamber. Everything had changed so much since then.

 _Wrong will be right..._ Yes. But even those true Narnian histories didn't say how very true that saying was. Neither did they say how very much joy there was with it. For there had been joy, surprising joy, from the moment of her walk in the gardens to meet Aslan. The simple joy of following morning's golden and glorious sunrise, to the altogether deeper joy that had lit Queen Lucy's face when Gwen had met her on the way to breakfast.

"You've met Aslan!" Queen Lucy had announced. And before Gwen had managed to find the words to agree, without so much as another word of warning, the youngest of the queens from Narnia's Golden Age had flung her arms around Gwen's waist and given her a massive hug.

She must have said something to King Edmund too, for the Just King had shaken her hand without warning either when they met, later in the morning. "It's not always easy meeting Aslan for the first time."

He had said it with rather boyish awkwardness; but then, Gwen had supposed, while she returned the handshake and curtseyed for good measure as a lady-in-waiting should, it couldn't have been terribly easy meeting people who knew you as a hundreds of years old example of treachery and redemption.

Redemption. Even the word, right here and now in this crowd outside the coronation, made Gwen smile. And why should it not? Was not this crowd of restored, united Narnians under that grace of the Lion too?

 _To save Edmund … and all Narnia … and me too._

Gwen knew that she had smiled despite herself at King Edmund. A most improper thing for a lady-in-waiting to do – but King Edmund had simply broken into a veritable grin of understanding.

"Will you come to Beruna after all, now?" he'd asked earnestly.

She had said no, again. Not because she was afraid to meet Aslan, this time, but because that one golden, glorious meeting the night before had felt as if it would be quite enough for ever more. Besides which, had Aslan not been, in a way, still there? In the faces of His Kings and Queens? In the brightness the whole day seemed full of? In the everyday duties of the court – perhaps most especially that one? The castle storerooms, which Gwen _knew_ had been running rather low, particularly the last morning when Countess Erimon had scraped together the pot-luck breakfast, had proved surprisingly plenteous for feeding the horde of Old Narnians.

So, she had curtseyed and said "No, Your Majesty. But thank you for asking"; and King Edmund had gone off after the other two Kings to see the kennels; and Gwen, waiting a moment to let them clear, had reviewed her answer with satisfaction. What was there to go to Beruna for?

The question had niggled and echoed at her all the rest of that day. What was there to go to Beruna for? And why had it sounded such a familiar question? Almost as if somebody else had said it, and she was but repeating it?

Only in the evening, crossing the empty Great Hall on her way out to where King Caspian and Their Majesties were eating dinner that evening with the main body of the army camped outside Beaversdam Castle, had the answer come to Gwen. The Countess Erimon! In this very Hall! Had stood at the end of the line of ladies-in-waiting, and asked "What is there to stay in Narnia for?"

Gwen realised she was standing stock-still in the crowd, staring at nothing. The marsh-wiggle and the Bulgy Bear had long since moved. Gwen scooped up her skirts yet again, and pressed forwards.

She had stood stock-still, staring at nothing, in the Great Hall of Beaversdam too. Staring: at nothing; at the empty space in the middle of the Hall; at the face of Countess Erimon as she had asked that question. But-! But-! But-! But there was so much to stay in Narnia for! There was Aslan to stay in Narnia for! Gwen had caught her breath and clasped her hands, because Countess Erimon simply must not, could not leave Narnia, unknowing of what there was to stay for! Then Gwen had unclasped her hands and laughed at herself, because presumably that was how Queen Lucy felt: a joyous, churning desire to dance up to everyone you knew and say _'Have you heard?! Do you know?! Have you met Aslan?!'_

And at the thought of Queen Lucy's sparkling blue eyes another memory had come back with a jolt. Another pair of puzzled blue eyes staring up at her. Another queen.

Prunaprismia.

And in the eyes of the Lion, as it were, Gwen had seen that last, angry, petty, spiteful outburst at the Telmarine queen. He hadn't said a word about it, either.

But if wrong was made right where Aslan was...

There had been another very long silence in that silent Great Hall and then Gwen had taken a very deep sigh, and gone to try and find somebody who she should ask for leave to go to Beruna from.

In the end, she had gone as a last minute addition to a group of centaurs and King Edmund, who were taking dispatches from Caspian down to Beruna. It had been a strange sort of journey, for King Edmund had ridden beside her and talked about how Narnia had used to be, until Gwen had felt that she was riding on two roads at once: one the plain, everyday road to humdrum Beruna she had always known; the other through the Golden Age. It was definitely the latter as their horses splashed through the Ford of Beruna, instead of crossing the river by the now vanished Old Bridge of Caspian the Third; and then Gwen had definitely been back in the present day as they had reined up in the gateway and King Edmund had asked politely if she wanted company to wherever she was going.

Where was she going? Gwen had shaken her head quickly at the thought of the Just King being present at what was probably going to be a humiliating apology to Prunaprismia, however the other half of her errand, in trying to persuade Countess Erimon to stay, worked out. Then she had realised that she had no idea where to find them. Perhaps King Edmund had guessed this, for he had turned away to speak to the body of Dwarf guardsmen at the gate, and a moment later a Black Dwarf had come pattering up to Gwen and announced himself as Droggin and "Entirely at your Ladyship's service."

Prunaprismia and ladies-in-waiting had apparently been lodging in the upper rooms of the Town Hall. It was appropriate, Gwen had supposed, for the Queen's rank – but surely they and the infant prince might have been a little more comfortable in a house? Typical – but then Gwen had hastily reminded herself that she was here to apologise, not criticise. And she had crossed the street and addressed the guard at the door:

"May I speak to Her Majesty, please?"

She had turned over a thousand ways to ask that question, all the way through Beruna. Something to say she was a Telmarine who still held Prunaprismia to be Queen – and not betray Narnia or Caspian either. To refer to Prunaprismia as 'Her Majesty' had seemed best and most truthful, in the end, but it hadn't seemed to suit the sullen looking guard.

"The Queen and her attendants are seeing no-one."

"But-" Gwen had blinked at the woodenness of his reply. "But I would like to speak to her, please. And the Countess Erimon."

"The Queen and her attendants are seeing no-one."

"But I am one of her attendants."

"The Queen and her attendants are seeing no-one."

She might as well have been arguing with a tree, as the saying went. But shouldn't, Gwen had realised. All the Trees she had met in these last few days were _much_ more reasonable! She had drawn herself up. One of the advantages of being tall and leggy and bone-y was that you could do that and look most of the Royal guards in the eye. This was one of the regular Royal guards. He should certainly have known her by sight, as she did him.

"I am one of her Majesty's ladies-in-waiting. And the Countess Erimon is my cousin. Will you kindly inform one or other of them I am here?"

He had looked at her, almost through her, as if he'd never seen her before. Gwen was fairly certain he had opened his mouth to parrot that same phrase again, when the door had opened a crack behind him. Lady Berenice's face had peeped out. "Whatever's the problem?"

She had spoken to the guard, but Gwen had stepped forwards quickly. "Berenice!"

Silence.

"I've come to see the Queen. On a private matter. And the Countess Erimon. All of you," Gwen had added as Lady Berenice had continued to stare at the guard, not herself. "May I come in? Please?"

Silence.

"I need to see the Queen," Gwen had repeated, in a slightly steelier tone. In the hierarchies of the Telmarine court, she ranked above Berenice by a year in age and by a generation closer to the crown. "I have come to speak to the Queen."

Berenice's gaze had finally shifted to Gwen. There was not even a flicker of recognition in those stony eyes. "The Queen," she had said, "is seeing no Narnians. Neither are her ladies-in-waiting. It would be unsafe for His Majesty the Prince." And she had stepped back into the house and shut the door.

Gwen was still unsure exactly how she had made her way back to the gates. Droggin had tactfully left her when they'd reached the Town Hall, and the rest of Beruna had turned into an aching haze of the tears ladies-in-waiting do not shed in public. The first clear thing had been King Edmund's face, looking round from his conversation with a centaur in the gateway.

He hadn't asked. He hadn't even looked like he was going to ask and then thought better of it. He had simply gestured to the chair and small keg one of the Dwarves was carrying forwards. "Can you manage with a make-shift mounting block, your Ladyship? We're about ready to go."

Narnians... Gwen had fought back a fresh welling of tears, and reached down from her saddle as King Edmund had came round to hand her the reins after mounting. "Your Majesty-"

There hadn't really been words to say what she meant. How should she have said she was glad she didn't have to ride back to Beaversdam by herself? That she was grateful for his tactful chivalry? That she was sorry her people would say such a thing about the Narnia he belonged to? That Kings and Queens are made by the gift of Aslan and without that are nothing but petty vanity?

"Thank you," she had managed eventually.

It had been an inadequate phrase, but King Edmund had met her gaze and shaken his head. "If-" He had hesitated for a moment, but only to find the right words. "Aslan opens the way as far as He would have us go, you know. Beyond that, it is between His Paws."

 _He opens the way as far as He would have us go._ That was not an old saying of Narnia, as far as Gwen knew. But she rather felt it ought to become one of them. For in these barely two weeks since the war, Aslan had opened so many ways, so many impossible ways, with an ease that matched Gwen's final few paces out of the crowd to the doorway where the eldest of Glenstorm the Centaur's sons and the second of the Bulgy Bears stood on official duty as doorkeepers. No unknowing, stony gazes from them. The centaur bowed graciously, the Bulgy Bear whisked his paws out of his mouth and bowed rather rotundly.

The first Opening, of course, had been the Door Between the Worlds. Gwen had not gone to see it, but she had heard about it in great detail from the chief of the Talking Mice. Once he was quite certain you belonged to Aslan and were not thinking about traps or toasted cheese, Reepicheep was a great conversationalist. In every detail she had heard about the Door, and the places to which it led, and the departure of their Majesties and all the Telmarines.

All the Telmarines. Reepicheep had put it that way, and Gwen had accepted it that way. Those who were gone were of Telmar; those who remained belonged to the Lion and hence Narnia. And if there remained a slight stab of sadness at the thought of Countess Erimon and even the infant Prince who would never know the beauty of Narnia nor its Lion, Gwen carefully countered it each time with the thought that Aslan had sent them to that new land. He had provided that new home – He would in some way be there. Maybe, Countess Erimon and the prince...

She could imagine Countess Erimon being the nurse for the prince. Quite simply because she had been the only one being sensible, and infants need someone sensible to look after them. And there was some hope in that, for Countess Erimon had, after all, raised her three sons to be men of honour and integrity enough to go the block rather than accept the treason of Miraz.

Gwen began to work her way along the rows of benches that had been laid out for the Court to sit on, shuffling to get her skirts along the narrow space. Shuffling – like a tree wading through the earth. And that had been the second, and almost as impossible Way that had opened.

This was not Beaversdam.

This was Cair Paravel.

The old tales had spoken of the Royal Castle of the Golden Age, but not even the Old Narnians seemed to have believed in its continued existence. From the Telmarine point of view, it had been somewhere in the Black Woods, and therefore as untrue as the ghosts.

But just as Cair Paravel had waited in the snow through the years of the White Wiitch, to be Aslan's chosen seat of His Kings and Queens, so Cair Paravel had waited in the woods for Aslan again and another true king of Narnia. And at Aslan's command the Trees which had kept the castle safe had moved back, forming up into a grand avenue that Caspian might be crowned as a king of Narnia should be, in the Throne Room of Cair Paravel.

Gwen glanced about at the tall stone walls, the ivy that had covered them now partly gone and supplemented by gay, silken swags and leafy garlands. It didn't matter that the roof was missing or the main floor of the hall below the dais was still grass. In fact, in the circumstances it seemed much more appropriate for the coronation to be under a bright blue sky on a lawn as smooth and level as the Dancing Lawn of the fauns themselves. Half the members of the court wouldn't have wanted to sit anywhere other than on grass, anyway.

This included the fauns, who had spent yesterday laying careful chalk lines to show where sitting areas were. Gwen had heard Caspian laughingly asking what if _he_ wanted to sit on the grass – but his was the great gold embellished throne of Caspian the Conqueror, with the back panel with the Telmarine arms on replaced by the Lion Rampant of Narnia. It had come in pieces from Beaversdam, along with the benches and tables, for nothing else had survived at Cair Paravel except in the treasure chamber. Only the walls – but what else did they need? One throne for one king for one country – and benches for those who didn't want to sit on the grass.

Gwen would have put herself in the 'doesn't mind either way' group, but Caspian's old Nurse was definitely too old to flop on a lawn. She was already there, in the front row, as Gwen finally took her seat in the row behind. This far forwards seemed rather too important a spot for herself, Gwen felt, when there were all the heroes from Caspian's army to be accommodated. But by the king's especial request, this second row was for the six Telmarines who had stayed to greet him at Beaversdam. One by one, they joined her: the middle-aged guardsman looking still somewhat anxious amid so many Talking Beasts; his younger son and the younger kitchen maid simply beaming with excitement; and his older son and the older kitchen maid, shyly trying to look at each other without anyone, including each other, noticing.

Gwen looked away carefully, catching as she did the eye of the Nurse who was also looking away carefully, to the rapidly filling Hall behind. The fauns were pattering about, guiding people into last available places and out of the central aisle. This Great Hall was bigger than that in the castle at Beaversdam, which was just as well. Given the sheer numbers of Narnians who had turned up, there was a good chance many of them would have to stand outside. The coronation feast had been adjusted and expanded until it was to be held in the orchards.

More, and more, and more. And then there was a sort of lull, and a minute of quiet that wasn't silence, and the first thin pipes of the fauns sounded. The coronation of His Majesty King Caspian the Tenth of Narnia, and yet another saying would once again be true in Narnia:

 _W_ _hen Adam's flesh and Adam's bone, sit in Cair Paravel on throne, the evil time will be over and gone._

Only – there was one tiny sadness in that. The evil time – the domination of Telmar – would, today, be finally over and gone. And glad though he would have been to see Caspian on the throne, Rhoop belonged to that Telmarine Narnia, not this restored and reunited land. No-one apart from herself would even remember the banished Telmarine lords any longer, if there was anyone within this crowd who even remembered them yet. Caspian's Nurse, perhaps. But her duties had been so in a different part of the Court and castle, she wasn't going to remember Rhoop and the other boys as people, just long-gone faces at the most. Apart from that-? No-one. Even the middle-aged guardsman had only been transferred to the castle guard out of the regular army after Miraz had seized the throne.

Well! She remembered them. Gwen pushed the sadness aside. She had Aslan now. And a new and restored Narnia. And Caspian – who walked, with Trumpkin on one side of him and Trufflehunter on the other, between the rows of standing Narnians to take his throne and his vows as rightful King of Narnia.

He was so young, and so kingly, and so like his father, and so very much with the grace of Aslan about him… Gwen was glad that she had brought her only second-best handkerchief, because it was larger. And then that she had actually brought two of them, because the first was overwhelmed. And then to see that Caspian's Nurse was also hunting in vain for a dry spot between three handkerchiefs. This really was ridiculous! She had never been such a waterspout before in her life! And there was certainly nothing to cry over!

Beyond her absurd, Clothilde-like veil of tears, Caspian's voice went on: vowing to be good to all Talking Beasts of Narnia; to all men of Narnia; to all Trees and Waters and every other creature of Narnia; and to hold none in unjust favour or contempt.

"...by the Name of the Lion, so help me."

Gwen abandoned being perfectly lady-like and wiped her face with her lace sleeve. She looked up again to find there was silence. Was it finished?

"And I vow," said Caspian steadily, "by the Name of the Lion and the Great Emperor Over the Sea, that once there is peace in our land of Narnia, I will take ship Eastward for a year and a day, to seek there those seven loyal lords of Narnia, the friends of my father, whom Miraz sent to the Eastern End of the world, or seek their fate and avenge them if we may."

~:~:~


	8. Chapter 8

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter Eight

"Three years is _such_ a long time...!"

Gwen looked up from where she was busily stamping out rounds of ship's biscuit dough, ready to go in the castle ovens. On the other side of the trestle table, Bethen, the older of the two kitchen maids who had stayed at Beaversdam when the Telmarines had left, had stopped working altogether. Her hands rested idly on the her dough and cutter, while she stared at a spot in mid-air.

From the expression on the girl's face, Gwen guessed Bethen probably wasn't seeing the dancing flour particles in the sunlight which was all she herself could see just there. Being the only lady-in-waiting in the royal household, since the rest of the '-in-waitings' were fauns, had apparently qualified her for the position of confidant to the four younger Telmarines who had stayed. Or perhaps it was just that none of them had a mother. In the old Telmarine court, it would have been shockingly improper for a junior guardsman or a kitchen maid to speak to a lady-in-waiting in more than brief and deferential greeting. But such rigid hierarchies did not belong to the Narnian court – and Gwen didn't mind, either. Particularly. Except for Bethen's tendency this morning to forget what she was doing, when they were in such a rush job for the biscuit baking that Gwen and six of the fauns-in-waiting had been drafted in to help in the kitchens.

Gwen rather wished that the older of the middle-aged guardsman's two sons had waited just a few more days before proposing to Bethen. It had been blindingly obvious since King Caspian's coronation. Gwen had heard about it in lengthy half-whispers from Bethen and abrupt, disjointed sentences from her admirer, on and off all the time since. But now, when the whole castle of Cair Paravel was in a ferment of activity,they had to go and get engaged!

It wouldn't have been so bad, if Bethen had not been an orphan and therefore unable to marry until she was twenty-one. But thus it was – and hence the gusty sighs, and romantic repinings, and unfinished biscuits.

"It won't seem so long when you've lived through it," Gwen put in gently. "Don't stop cutting biscuits, please."

The latter part of her words went unheeded, probably unheard. Bethen turned a pair of dramatically reproving eyes to Gwen. "Don't you think it's been _forever_ since the King's coronation...?"

The King's coronation had been three years ago. And the honest answer to that question was yes. Those three years had seemed so much longer than all years before, with the hope of King Caspian's coronation oath waiting each and every day.

 _To seek those seven loyal lords of Narnia..._

But ladies-in-waiting have certain duties of dignity and discretion and lady-like deportment. They cannot repine like love-struck teenagers. The first year of Caspian's reign had not been so bad. While there had been no more war, there had certainly not been 'peace'. There had been so much to do: sorting and settling and putting to rights, like a country-wide spring cleaning, all of which had suddenly been compounded by the Calormenes.

"Cobbles and Kettledrums!" Trumpkin the Red Dwarf had grumbled at the time. "Even when they're not unhelpful, those darkies, they don't help!"

To the Narnian court that barely had time to draw breath between dawn and dusk, with the King practically living on the road trying to sort things out, the Calormenes had sent a most dignified and respectful delegation of grave-faced Tarkaans who expected to be royally entertained, a message from the Tisroc presenting solemn congratulations and desiring immediate discussions about amicable future relations, and more ivory than Gwen had ever imagined existed. Offloaded from the four Calormen trading ships, it had covered most of the seaward lawn at Cair Paravel.

"Well!" Gwen had overheard Caspian remarking to Doctor Cornelius, when the Calormen delegation had retired to their ships for the night. "I was wondering when we should start repairing the Cair – and I suppose Aslan couldn't really have sent us a much larger sign!"

The building work had run all through that first winter and on into the next summer. Scaffolding had still covered much of Cair Paravel when Narnia had assembled to celebrate the first anniversary of the War of Deliverance and the King's coronation. Gwen had taken a dozen hankies, and somehow managed not to use a single one.

Possibly because she had sat next to Doctor Cornelius who had denied that he needed them, but been obliged to borrowed every one to wipe his mysteriously wet glasses. But possibly not. Something had felt too taut within Gwen to cry. Because – she had known, up at Beaversdam, that such things had happened. But only coming down to Cair Paravel had she seen for herself the new quay which the Narnian giants had dug out at the edge of the island, and the two ships. The _Wind Farer_ was simply a Galmian trading vessel purchased and renamed; _The_ _Lantern_ was new. Only a copy of the Galmian one, but a new ship, the first Narnian-built ship for centuries, all the same. And snatches of gossip through the crowds had talked eagerly of the new shipyard in Glasswater, and the dry-dock that was being dug to start another ship this winter. A bigger ship, an ocean-going, Eastern-sailing ship...

Suddenly it had all seemed very real. The King's promised voyage to the East, yes; but even more the voyage of Rhoop and the other boys whom Caspian was sailing for. It had seemed yet more real, painfully real, actually on board the ships. For the two ships, as part of the celebrations, were open to visitors. Everybody had been going round them, and however reluctantly, Gwen had found herself one of everybody. She hadn't even been able to change her mind suddenly once on board and flee away, for the Lord Drinian had materialised at her elbow to show the King's chief Lady-in-waiting around.

Drinian was a 'returned' Narnian from the Seven Isles. He was captain of _The Lantern,_ joint admiral of Narnia's two ship navy, and of a single minded love for the sea. His conversation had thus run earnestly upon one line only, and Gwen had found her mind wandering. This was a Galmian ship. Was it the same as the one Miraz had hired from Galma? And if it was, where had the boys fitted into it? How had they divided the cabins? How had they spent their days?

"Are you fond of ships?" Drinian had asked suddenly, as if he had read her mind or at least detected her intense interest.

Gwen hadn't been sure how to answer that one. There had been a time when she had passionately hated ships and the sea and all things connected with them, because they existed and were to be used to take Rhoop away from her. The thought of King Caspian now going away on one at some point made her feel unsettled and anxious. But – but if a ship was to go and bring Rhoop home – she couldn't hate them. And there was-

Gwen had opted for the most acceptable answer to her present companion: "There is _something_ about them, isn't there?"

Drinian had quite agreed. His conversation had set sail once more, expounding the glories of ships in general and remembering ships in particular he had known. The first one he'd sailed on … the first one he'd captained … large ships and small ships and …

Gwen had nodded and listened. It was something ladies-in-waiting did a lot of, but her question hadn't just been the empty remark of 'making polite conversation.' There _was_ something about a ship, when you met it close up. Something in the smell of salt and tar and hemp rope and damp wood – very different to the smell of the sea by itself, and somehow more stirring too. Something in the feel of the rigging and the heavy cloth of the sails where you touched them; something in the thousand little noises about her; something in the way the deck shifted beneath your feet...

There was a reason why the King's eyes lit up when ships were mentioned. And there had come to be a reason, quite aside from her unmentioned hopes for Rhoop, why Gwen had taken up taking as great an interest in the news of the how the ships were doing as of how the repair work at Cair Paravel was doing.

The Cair had been finished in that second winter. The Narnian court had moved with much rejoicing, in a foul wet week that had made the muddy road down from Beaversdam seem longer than ever, in the early spring. And at the same time, the new ship had begun. In Cair Paravel, the news about it had come much faster, and Gwen's heart had seemed to beat much faster about it, too. The best season for sailing opened in early summer. Would – would-?

Money for the work had been rather tight. But that had not brought the sudden end to that year's hopes. The Giants on Narnia's northern border had chosen that moment to start raiding. The King had had to go north, not east, and it had taken him the whole summer and into the autumn before the Giants had been properly defeated. Gwen had gathered up her whole defunct hatred of ships and poured it out in the direction of marauding giants – until Caspian had returned in triumph, with the first of an annual payment of tribute large enough to have the abandoned ship in Glasswater finished without any more delays or worries about costs. Which meant-

Gwen drew a long breath and sighed almost as deeply as Bethen. Which meant they were here. Baking and packing and otherwise getting ready for the King's long awaited voyage to the East.

Down at the quay was _The Dawn Treader,_ a glory of purple sail and green hull and great, bronze dragon prow and tail. If there was something about ships, there was very much something about _The Dawn Treader_! All Narnia, not just Gwen and the King and Drinian, seemed to be feeling it this time. In everybody's faces was the unspoken longing to go too; the crew members were feted and envied everywhere they went; and Gwen doubted there was a small boy in Narnia who would have chosen anything over getting to be the cabin boy of the Dawn Treader.

She suspected it was this spirit of national excitement which had led to Bethen and the guard's engagement. Gwen just wished they had not chosen right now. Not, really, for the practical problems of incessant daydreaming. But because-

Gwen rapped the rolling pin smartly on the table. "Carry on cutting, please!"

You couldn't really be irritated by Bethen, any more than you could go on hating giants who sent glowing acknowledgements of the power and majesty of what they termed "Narnia's Lion" and enough tribute to build beautiful ships. For, when rescued from her daydreams, Bethen raced to make up time with a speed and skill in biscuit cutting that made Gwen feel very much that kitchen maids are probably far more useful and worthwhile people than ladies-in-waiting, who mostly know how to embroider and stick cushions under queens' feet. That tray of biscuits was filled, whirled across the kitchen to the waiting stack by the bread oven, and followed by another and another. Gwen couldn't keep up. But then, she wasn't eighteen and just engaged.

Aye, to be eighteen and just engaged...

That was why she wished it hadn't been just now. Not that she minded or objected to anyone else getting engaged or married or anything! Just – just that the memory of it made the little, tight knot of anxiety inside Gwen feel somehow tighter and more anxious. Everyone else was thinking and talking about the king's voyage, more than his quest. How far would he go? The Lone Islands? The unknown seas beyond? Aslan's country? All that sort of thing. And even if they did speak of the quest, it was in a sort of numerical way. Would King Caspian find all the missing lords? Or how many? One? – two? – six?

It all made Gwen want to – but she wasn't sure what. Scream, maybe; or run away; or go to sleep for the year and the day Caspian was pledged to sail Eastward for, until someone might wake her and tell her the worst – that there was no news and no lords and the Lone Islanders had buried the few unidentifiable bodies which had washed ashore from the shipwreck nearly twenty years before.

Nay! It could not be so! Surely Aslan would not have opened the way for this voyage if it was all in vain. And there was no other way than the grace of Aslan that you could ascribe all the comings-together for this journey. The victory over the giants; the tribute; the exact number of skilled Narnian seafarers who had come back from Galma and Archenland and Calormen to make up the crew of the Dawn Treader. Even this unseasonally early summer weather, such that Caspian would be at sea and well out towards the Lone Islands before the third anniversary of his coronation. It could not be in vain.

Gwen repressed another sigh. And there lay the other fear. What if Caspian did find them? What if – what if they had just not come back? Found a good land, and recognised that there was no life for them in Narnia under Miraz, and just – forgotten – Narnia and anyone they had left behind?

No! That could not be, either! Or at least not for all of them! Octesian might have stopped for treasure; Argoz who was fond of a good and comfortable life might have stopped somewhere with the best Calormen mustard (a weakness of his the other boys had always teased him about) but not – the others!

Mavramorn? Gwen demanded of the niggling fear, stubbornly refusing to consider the nearer and dearer example. Stop and settle down? With his deep love of adventure and quest to find what it was beyond the eastern sunrise?

 _Ah, but_ , the fear began to retort. _It's..._

Gwen picked up the last ball of dough and slammed it down on the table and the fear. As King Edmund had said: Aslan opens the way as far as he would have us go. The rest is up to Him. For the King, that meant the journey to the East. For herself, that meant waiting in Cair Paravel. Gwen permitted herself a slightly wry smile. The Lion knew she had plenty of practice at that! She _was_ a lady-in-waiting!

~:~

There wasn't much time for waiting in the next two days. All provisions to be gathered; all cargo to be stowed; twelve reluctant hens to be recaptured when they decided they didn't share the enthusiasm of the rest of Narnia, would rather not sail on the Dawn Treader, and escaped into the castle orchards; the ceremony of Trumpkin being named Regent of Narnia in the King's absence; and then, suddenly, the early breakfast and the gathering on the quay for the morning tide.

To take ship eastward for a year and a day... It seemed like almost every Narnian had come to see Caspian and the Dawn Treader off. Certainly someone from every part of Narnia, just like the day of the coronation. Men, Beasts, fauns, centaurs, dryads, satyrs, dwarves, naiads – they filled the whole island of Cair Paravel with their presence and their humming voices. So very, very different to Rhoop and the boys' nearly unlamented departure, Gwen reflected, standing with the rest of the court party near the front of the crowd. Maybe the more people saw you off, the greater the chance of returning. No! Gwen caught her thoughts and shook her head at them. Whether you came back or not was Aslan's will and His alone.

"...and commend you all to the care of the Lion." At the foot of the gang-plank, Caspian raised his voice in final farewell, bent and spoke a few last words to Trumpkin, and then lifted one hand to them all and stepped on board.

Amidst the great clamour of cheers that arose in reply and farewell, the gang-plank was drawn in and the mooring ropes cast off. They could see Caspian on the deck, talking to Drinian, and the crew rushing about. And then a steady chant sprang up on board and men began to strain at the rigging. The great purple sail rose, inch by inch; flapped in the breeze and then swelled out. Between wind and ebbing tide, the Dawn Treader's prow dipped and rose and took its first rolling plunge toward the east. On the shore, hats and hands, paws and tails, and all manner of cheers rose again. And King Caspian was off on his voyage, to seek the seven lost friends of his father.

Even with a fair wind, it takes time for a ship to go out of sight, and Narnia stood still on the quay, and waited until then. It must have been mid-morning when a sort of collective sigh ran through the crowd, and everyone began to move again, and exclaim on how stiff they were and how late it was, and all the other commonplaces typical among those who have stayed behind, and are not, just at this rawest moment of parting, going to speak of the travellers.

Gwen could hear herself saying such things, felt herself moving through the crowd and back towards the castle gate, but it was all like a dream. None of it seemed real – as though everyone and everything that was real had gone away with Caspian.

"Lady Gwen! Oh, Lady Gwen!"

No, not everyone that was real. Bethen's younger sister Rhianel pushed out of the crowd towards Gwen in the shadow of the gateway. "Whatever shall we do without the king?!"

Gwen stopped. Why Aslan should have allotted to her care two ever-anxious kitchen maids who were prone to dramatic announcements, she wasn't sure. But thus it was – and Rhianel was looking so very young and lost and anxious and only fifteen – Gwen held out her hand.

"The King was away last year, too."

"That wasn't the same!" Rhianel protested, taking Gwen's hand and holding on rather tightly.

Gwen had to agree with that – but what they must do and the over-riding hope of it all was the same. The same as last year, the same as all these years.

 _Courage, dear heart..._

"We have to wait, Rhianel. Wait for the King and trust in the Lion."

~:~:~:~

 _A/N: Once again, Gwen has gone and subdivided her chapters! This was to have been the penultimate; now there will be two more!_

 _I realise this chapter does skim very quickly over the first three years of Caspian's reign. This is because I have two other fics in progress about these: "The Call of the Running Tide" and "Soli Deo Gloria." When Gwen is finally done... :)_

 _~:~:~:~_


	9. Chapter 9

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter Nine

Wait for the King. Trust in the Lion. Courage, dear heart.

They were all easy things to say. Far easier to say than do. And some days, Gwen felt, they were just even harder than usual, for no reason at all. Today was one of them.

The days which were hard for a reason were easier. Like the third anniversary of Caspian's coronation. All Narnia had seemed to be rather quiet that day, thinking like Gwen, no doubt, of the three years that had passed and the year or more that must pass before their young king would be home again. Or even the less shared and public days, like Rhoop's birthday. That had been a hard day every year he had been gone. But you could grit your teeth and mutter _'Courage, dear heart,'_ and know it would pass and tomorrow would be easier. The days without reason, however...

Gwen sighed. _Courage, dear heart!_ But all that did was remind her of the day Rhoop had gone away and – and today she would really rather _not_ be reminded of that, and how long ago it was. For Bethen, still moping happily and romantically about, counting off the very long time of three years by the number of kisses she could manage to sneak out of the kitchens and acquire from her betrothed guardsman, had protested a lack of sympathy on the part of the king's Lady-in-waiting:

"Weren't you _ever_ in love?"

Another sigh escaped before Gwen could catch it and suppress it. Bethen's tone had made it quite clear that in Bethen's eyes, there was absolutely no way Gwen could have reached such an age and unsympathetic attitude as to complain about the bread being scorched while the kitchen maid supposed to be minding it was elsewhere, if she had ever been in love. Gwen had suddenly felt as if she was the Countess Erimon – except she had had a family. Evidence, as it were, that you had perhaps not always been quite as old and dull and unremarkable as you now were.

How did you say you had been engaged since you were seventeen? That if love grows out of friendship, you had probably been in love since you were six? Of course, if you were in love, you probably didn't hit people with their new wooden swords – but Gwen wasn't sure about that. Even engaged, she and Rhoop had continued to argue. The only change had been that the sparring had become verbal and the concluding making-up more than the childhood handclasp.

All that – all those years – and now who knew? _Weren't you_ _ **ever**_ _in love?_

It would not be courageous or trusting or patient – it would, in fact, be feeble – Gwen gave in and rested her forehead against the wall. "Oh, Rhoop, Rhoop..."

Where was he? Was he even still anywhere? Where was the King? Where was the Lion? Why did it all seem to eat away at her?

Gwen pulled her head off the wall, straightened up, straightened her gown. The answer, like all the other things, was very simple. In the East. That was, after all, Aslan's country. He came from over the sea. And Rhoop had gone East. And Caspian had gone East.

She knew the most about that voyage. They had received reports of the great tournament on Galma and news had drifted back that _The Dawn Treader_ had bypassed plague stricken Terebinthia. After that, nothing. The Lone Islands were to have been the next landfall, and no news had reached Narnia from there in the three years of Caspian's reign. Nor in all the years before that, either, but that meant less. Emperor of the Lone Islands was not a title the Telmarine kings had ever really wished to claim, given that it meant acknowledging the existence of both the sea and a pre-Telmarine history of Narnia.

Caspian had claimed it, of course, as true king of Narnia. Gwen only hoped the Lone Islanders had been accepting of the arrival of their king-emperor. News of all the changes in Narnia had probably not reached them before now, they were so far away to the east. Not even the Lord Drinian, with all his years as a trading captain, had been there, though he had apparently been a mine of information about the Seven Isles and Galma and Terebinthia and even Calormen.

But whether the Lone Islands had been welcoming or not, _T_ _he Dawn Treader_ must be long past them now. Somewhere, somewhere, in the Eastern ocean. Gwen rubbed her eyes wearily. That was another thing which was making today hard for no reason. Last night, she had had the old nightmare. Or rather, a sort of new nightmare, that was a combination of both of them: the tangled forest which had stopped after she had met Aslan; and the falling, falling, into endless blackness, that had been from before Rhoop had sailed away, and had stopped once she had learned to go to sleep picturing those massing clouds like the Eastern End of the World and murmuring _'Courage, dear heart'._ First Berenice and then Clothilde had been wont to complain to the other ladies-in-waiting about how Gwen muttered in her sleep.

Gwen hoped they had only meant her mumblings going to sleep, and not that she had cried out audibly when she had cried through the tangled forest for Rhoop and Caspian and the Lost Voice. Probably not. Or not clearly at least. Anybody in the court of Miraz who cried out for Aslan in their sleep would surely have been either dismissed or executed.

Dismissed – like Caspian's old Nurse. Or executed – like Countess Erimon's sons.

Gwen shook her head and hurried on. Not that she had anywhere particular to hurry to, today. Which meant she didn't have to go to the kitchens and face Bethen again, unless Rhianel managed to scorch the bread too – but it left her no other distraction. No-one to be waited on, with the king away. Nothing to sort out, for there was no-one to mess it up. The Fauns-in-waiting kept the castle in spotless order; the moles and hama-dryads kept the grounds in matching order; and all that was really left for a lady-in-waiting to do was sit quietly and embroider! Just as it had been when Caspian had been gone during the War of Deliverance! That day watching Countess Erimon and worrying about the nightmare of the tangled forest...

Gwen stopped in despair. She really couldn't get away from it all, today! Aye, like in the dream. Only there she had not been in the everyday halls and rooms and courtyards of Cair Paravel, but lost once more in the tangled forest – except that it had, somehow, also been the place of falling, falling, into utter blackness. In the blackness had been the forest, and she had struggled through it, crying out. Not for someone who was lost and gone away, not for anyone, but for a noise. A steady, steady, creaking. Gwen had woken with the noise still in her ears – a strange sound, and yet almost familiar. It was as if she had heard it before, quite often, quite recently – but she could not put her finger on what it was. Awake, it haunted the edge of her mind. If she could just, just, just think what it was!

In the dream, she had sort of known what it was – it had been a noise she had not heard for many years – and whatever it was, she had struggled towards it, crying out, in fear and in vain. Fear that it would not hear her, fear that it would hear her – and all in vain. It mattered so much that the noise got away, did not come to the place of tangled darkness – and yet it kept steadily onwards.

It was a nightmare. It was only a nightmare. Gwen had told herself that again and again, from the moment she had woken up, gasping with fear and wishing that the being the only lady-in-waiting at Cair Paravel didn't mean she had to sleep alone. She had told herself that all day. It was only a dream It was only a nightmare.

Had she not once said about something being said so firmly and constantly that the say-er thereof knows it is not true?

Of course it had to be only a nightmare. Gwen pushed the whole tangle firmly aside in her mind. It was vain to ask. Was not that what she should have learned, a fortnight ago?

Life at Cair Paravel, once the King had departed, had settled down into a steady sort of groove. Narnia was at peace, and was apparently demonstrating its appreciation of this by running its own affairs and minding its own business quietly by itself. Trumpkin was Regent. The Giants on the border were not being bothersome. The Archenlanders were on their own side of the mountains, being friendly. The Calormens were, as Trumpkin put it, misbehaving themselves elsewhere. With all this, life at the Cair had gone on steadily and quietly, one day following the next in quiet unremarkable-ness, rather like a line of sheep following their Satyr shepherd on the hills of Narnia.

Two weeks ago there had been a disturbance to this pattern. Two weeks ago, there had been the strangest noise in the middle of the afternoon and the castle walls had shaken as if they were having an earthquake. When someone had finally managed to hunt up Trumpkin, who as Regent ought to be responsible if Cair Paravel started falling down, he had not been concerned. He had, rather, almost split his doublet laughing.

"It was Aslan!" Trumpkin had wheezed out in the end. "Laughing!"

Aslan had been! To most of the residents of the castle, that fact seemed to be sufficient in itself. Gwen had lingered a moment longer. "Is everything all right?"

"Eh? Yes!"

Gwen had summoned a desperate calm. "And how – how is the King getting on?"

"Wouldn't tell me!" Trumpkin had said, inexplicably chuckling. "Not a word! So I said to Him, 'Well, he must be getting on all right! Or you'd be here to tell me what to do about running the place without him!' And do you know what He did?!" Trumpkin had paused and waved a hand towards the window. "Laughed! He laughed! Why do you think the roses have come into bloom a week early, eh?!"

The roses were still blooming, not fading any sooner despite their early start. Gwen supposed that was rather nice. Except she wished in a way that they would go, that they would stop being there to remind her with their colour and scent and the hum of the bees upon them, of the little niggle of anxiety Trumpkin's story had left with her.

The King, as Trumpkin said, must be getting on all right. But Gwen had not realised until Trumpkin said it that she had never thought of Caspian _not_ getting on all right. He was the king; he was in Aslan's care; he had gone away last year to the war with the giants and been all right – she had taken it for granted that he would be so again.

But what if he wasn't? Never mind whether his voyage was or was not – successful. Everybody at Cair Paravel thought she was simply concerned about the voyage in terms of the king's welfare. And while that wasn't the whole truth, it was true. What if...?

 _The sea doesn't eat people,_ Rhoop had said, long ago. But it had taken him away. And while Narnia would – surely – be looked after, whatever happened, what if Aslan did come again to tell Trumpkin what to do if-?

Gwen stopped abruptly. It was a sign of her mental abstraction that this was halfway up the stairs and a highly unsuitable place for stopping. But it seemed the only way to get a grip on her wandering thoughts – and fortunately there was nobody else about on this quiet back staircase. It was only the king and a boatload of sailors who had gone East, but somehow the big, old-and-new castle seemed empty without Caspian. And especially today.

As empty as the day at Beaversdam, when Prunaprismia had left before Caspian had arrived. And their Majesties, of course. Gwen deliberately seized a moment's respite at that memory, sending her mind off to range fondly over those four monarchs from the Golden Age, especially King Edmund and Queen Lucy. _They_ would have enjoyed a voyage to the end of the world, most of all Queen Lucy, with the prospect of Aslan's country at the very end of it.

Aye, but...! Gwen climbed a couple of steps higher up the stairs to gaze out of the narrow slit window that looked out to the east. Voyages were for the young. It was for everyone else to stay home in peace and quiet and worry about them. Except there wasn't peace here. Emptiness, yes. Solitude, yes. Peace, no.

Only quiet. The quiet from the day at Beaversdam. The sort of quiet that falls when a moth finally gives up beating its wings against the glass and falls down, dead. Dead...

Gwen found her hands were shaking against the cold stone of the windowsill. Somewhere, out there, east beyond the horizon, was Caspian. Caspian and the Lord Drinian and dear chivalrous Reepicheep and Master Rhince and Rynelf and the whole crew and the beautiful _Dawn Treader_ – and Rhoop!

Suddenly it seemed definite that Rhoop was out there! That he was with them! She would have _known_ if he had died! Somehow, she would have known! But that didn't mean he would be coming back! That didn't mean any of them would come back! They were out there! They could be in danger for all she knew! And there was nothing, nothing, nothing she could do about it!

The sea stretched away to the horizon: vast; impersonal; all-consuming! As big and unshiftable as the stone walls of Cair Paravel, that had survived the Long Winter and the Telmarine occupation, compared to a moth. And she, Gwen, was the moth; her hands shaking in vain against the windowsill as a moth's wings would beat in vain against the stone...

The whole world seemed to rear up, huge and dwarfing, to crush her as she had crushed that blundering moth with the long feathered eyebrows the night Miraz' son had been born. Halfway up the stairs was not a place to suddenly feel giddy! Gwen clutched frantically at the side of the window. That night! The night the dreams of falling, falling, had come back – and the black tangled forest – because she had said that Aslan was not! This felt like that!

"Aslan?" Gwen gasped out the word. But the world was still rearing up, up, up; and she was still a moth against the stone. "Aslan?! Where are You?"

Where was He? Where?! He was no longer a lost Voice in the tangled forest. Then why – why was He not here? Not just as He had visited Trumpkin, but as He had been here all through the War of Deliverance and the three years since? He had been here, and now-? Where was He in this whirling mass of fear and trouble and nagging dread?

Outside? But she had paced the gardens much of the morning, and there had been no peace. Only the scent of the roses nagging at her fears.

Like the moth, Gwen gave up and dropped her hands onto the windowsill. Except it wasn't right, to give up! Hadn't Aslan said so, when He had been there?

 _Why will you give up, Daughter of Eve?_

"Aslan?" Gwen asked shortly. "What have I done? I didn't give up. Why aren't You here?"

It was probably just as well He wasn't here, Gwen reflected, staring down at her hands. Speaking to Him like that. She hung her head. "I'm sorry. But – but, Aslan...?"

Aslan, Aslan, Aslan! The Name she had cried out to the Eastern End of the World, the day Rhoop had gone away towards that unknown East. The Name she had cried out because of what Caspian's Nurse had said...

 _...whenever they had troubles or need of help and comfort, they would go and look out to the Eastern end of the world, and call on the Lion, and he would hear them..._

Was that where Aslan was? Not in East, but lost again in the tangled forest – a tangled forest of her own effort, this time? Gwen let out a sudden, shuddery breath. Was He? Lost, shut out, left behind somewhere in the tangle of her own fears and worries and frettings, not a single one of which she had taken to Him? Had she entirely lacked that simple trust which had made Trumpkin welcome Aslan's visit so joyously, and chuckle patiently over the lack of a direct – and useless – answer over the king's whereabouts?

Had she run headlong into the blackness, and not noticed the Lion – behind her?

It felt almost as if she would see Aslan there, on the stairs, as Gwen turned round, away from the window. "Oh, Aslan." She shook her head. "Foolish, if not fat, you know."

It was a stupid thing to say. She always said stupid things! But not nearly as stupid as the things she did, though, and the memory of the walk in the gardens with the Lion pushed itself forwards. He hadn't seem to mind the stupid things she said. Only the stupid things she tried to do – like thinking about going away, instead of looking for Him.

Like trying to carry all her fears, instead of taking them to Him?

Gwen slowly sat down on the stairs, and let out a huge sigh. "I'm sorry." It was stupidly little, again, but it seemed to carry the burden of the whole summer – nay, the whole three years since Caspian's vow at his coronation – with it.

 _...and He would hear them..._

Yes. For He was here. The stone wall beside her was cool and safe, a refuge not a place to beat against, once more.

Refuge... The haunting sense of _The Dawn Treader_ in danger flickered up again. Gwen searched for what to say. Peace, safety – they seemed too small things to ask for. Too simple, just like when she had asked for a daughter for Miraz. Then, Aslan had answered with a realm for Caspian and a King for Narnia. This time-?

Gwen held out both hands. The Lion knew – that was the thing. And the holding out and hoping in Him was as much from Him, and as impossible to do alone, as the things that one asked for. "Aslan? Remember them. And let them – let them remember You, in whatever trouble."

A bird cried outside the window. The cry of the gulls at Cair Paravel was nothing unusual, right on the shore, but this was different. A single cry, not musical but not harsh either. Loud and strong, it cried again. Gwen stood up, to see a great white bird, far bigger than a gull, perhaps as big as the Talking Owls, turn outside the window and with great, slow wing-beats, head off towards the East.

It was only a fancy, but maybe it would be a messenger! Gwen raised one hand in farewell. "Tell them! By the grace of Aslan – courage, dear heart!"

~:~:~:~

 _A/N: Yes, you've all guessed what day this is! VotDT chapter 12, for those who haven't got the book to hand :)_

 _Many thanks to Slytherinsal for suggesting the first of Gwen's anxieties. And yes, there is really truly only one more chapter now!_


	10. Chapter 10

**The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Chapter 10**

 _A/N: "What!" you say. "Sunday again already?!" :D_

 _Having waited all these years, Gwen wouldn't wait another week. So, here we are._

 _Chapter the last. :')_

 _Chapter the longest. :P_

 _~:~:~_

"A little nearer … and then a cushion … no, not that high … and a softer cushion." Gwen bit down on her tongue and all unladylike noises it might utter, and turned to hunt through the random pile of hastily collected soft furnishings. The one thing Narnia had not been prepared for in the return of its King was the arrival of its Queen.

Today had bid fair to be a frustrating day from the moment Gwen had been dressing. She had sat down to button up her shoes and discovered that she had gone through the heels of both stockings. One hole would have been annoying; two was extremely annoying. Gwen had vented this on the stockings by wrenching them both off and throwing them as a tight little ball together into the mending basket, instead of changing one stocking at a time. She had been standing, bare-foot, rummaging for a replacement pair, when a shout had echoed through Cair Paravel.

" _The Dawn Treader! The Dawn Treader! The King! The King!"_

The Gwen of this afternoon stopped and shook her head at the Gwen of this morning. _What_ had come over her?! Her hair had been unbrushed, her feet bare – and the Dawn Treader had just been sighted on the horizon. Nothing would have been delayed in the least if she had stopped even one minute to make herself respectable.

Gwen steered her mind firmly back to the here-and-now problems of soft furnishings. A cushion, a cushion … why did ladies-in-waiting always have to worry about cushions?

They had known, from a week ago, that _The Dawn Treader_ was on the way home. A Galmian trading vessel had brought the news of her putting in to Galma, but the captain had been in such a hurry to be first with the news at Cair Paravel, he had set sail with no other details. The Narnian Royal pennant had been flying from _The Dawn Treader's_ mast head, so King Caspian must still have been on board – that was about all the fact they could derive.

There had been some Narnians who had wanted an immediate Welcoming Fleet to set forth, since Galma was only two days sail away, but Trumpkin had been adamant in opposition. The King had said that no-one was to set sail after him, no matter what happened or how long he was gone. Therefore, while he, Trumpkin, was Regent – and if any wished to query this, let them draw their sword for combat at once! – no-one was to set sail after the King, no matter how long he spent on Galma. Trumpkin even vetoed _The Wind-Farer_ from setting sail on its scheduled voyage to Calormen, lest there be a mutiny and change of direction once at sea.

" _Galma was only two days sail away!"_ Trumpkin was reputed to have shouted at _The Wind-Farer's_ captain Lord Polidan. _The King would be home in two days! Could Polidan not wait that long?!_

Perhaps, Gwen reflected, that had had something to do with her excessive haste this morning. For it had been ten days, not two. Ten very long days, in which everybody had tried very hard not to look at the eastern horizon every minute – maybe restraining themselves to every other minute, give or take a few extra looks. Trumpkin had held firm, and Gwen hadn't really been surprised, as the facts of this morning's return had slowly circulated during the day, to hear that it had been Trumpkin, walking alone on the eastern shore in the early dawn, who had first sighted the ship. His had been the burden of all Narnia for over a year – he had deserved that reward.

But strung to such breaking strain of waiting, all Cair Paravel had waited no longer. There had been a dense crowd at the quay even before Gwen, heedless of all duties of dignity and discretion and lady-like deportment, with her feet bare and her shawl on sideways so the fringe tickled her neck, had rushed out of the castle to join in the wait.

Right then, it hadn't seemed to matter. Now – Gwen blushed. Probably, since everyone else's eyes too had been fixed on the approaching ship, no-one had noticed her just standing in the crowd. They might not even have recognised her. Gwen couldn't remember who she had stood among, nothing but the pounding of her heart and the matching, pounding thought in her mind. Rhoop, Rhoop, Rhoop. Surely-? Maybe-? Had he-?

And then – and this was the worst to remember – the _Dawn Treader_ had finally drawn in, and the mooring ropes had been made fast, and the gang-plank had been lowered. And, though Gwen had only been able to see by standing on tiptoe to peer between the backs of the two people in front of her – they must have been centaurs, Gwen registered now, to be that tall and screening despite her own height – King Caspian had descended, with the most stunningly beautiful woman Gwen had ever seen, smiling on his arm. The crowd had begun to cheer.

Gwen hadn't – because behind the King and Queen had come four other men, four older men. One had had another young woman on his arm, and for a moment Gwen's heart had felt as if it stopped in dread. But then – then the last of the four men had come down the gang-plank. The other three had been grey-haired and well-built; this man was thin and drawn and white-haired. By something in the very way he stood, Gwen had known him.

Gwen wasn't sure she could blush any more at the memory. For she had begun to shout, almost shriek his name; she had veritably beaten on the backs of those poor centaurs who had stood innocently in front of her, and she had forced her way through the crowd, through the royal guards, through the royal party without so much as a curtsey, and into Rhoop's arms.

He had come back. He had come back.

She had a feeling she might have said that, somewhere within the circle of those thin, bony arms. She might have cried just a little, as well, with her face pressed into his tunic. She knew he'd cried, for she had felt hot tears trickle into her unbrushed hair. And he might have said something about ' _You waited'..._

For one, very long, moment or minute or eternity of time, there had only been the two of them, in each other's arms, in all the world. And then somewhere beyond that, the crowd had begun to cheer again, and it had dawned on Gwen that they were cheering for her and Rhoop as well as Caspian and the Queen, and she emerged blushing from Rhoop's embrace. Faces, at that point, were all she could remember: Caspian, at once the same and older, looking glad but startled; his beautiful young queen looking radiant and delighted; Trumpkin looking – thank the Lion! – at the King not herself; Lord Drinian – oh, the shame! – looking utterly startled; and then the three other men had pressed round.

Revilian. Argoz. Mavramorn. All of shining face and earnest greetings, and Mavramorn above all glowing with pride as he guided the other young woman forwards and said "Nerienne, Lady Gwen. Gwen, my wife!"

The first thing you noticed about Lady Mavramorn was that she sort of glowed, just like the rest of them; the second was that she squinted and had more freckles than you would really think possible. Gwen couldn't remember, but hoped that she had managed to utter some sort of decorous greeting, before the whole royal party, shepherded by the Talking Badgers of the Guard, had begun to move up the lawns towards the Cair. The crowd had parted before them and filled in after them, and Gwen had somehow been swept along too, still holding Rhoop's arm. He was home.

Aye, but the King was home, too. And, quite understandably, that was the main concern of all the other Narnians. It was certainly the main concern of Oscuns, the chief Faun-in-waiting, who had been standing, almost capering, at the main gateway to greet the King and Queen.

Gwen couldn't really blame him, either. She had spoken to no-one of why she had cared so about the King's voyage; it was entirely understandable he had assumed she had rushed down to greet the royal party in her role as the King's chief Lady-in-waiting. As the king passed into the courtyard, Oscuns had plunged forwards to pluck Gwen's sleeve for an immediate conference about the laying on of the ten-days-planned feast. Before Gwen had had time to hear more than a few words of what Oscuns had to say, Rhianel had appeared in tears because she had let the bread not scorch – "But burn, Lady Gwen, burn! Black!" – and the thousand duties of a lady-in-waiting had whirled up like a storm and swept her away from Rhoop without another word or look.

Gwen picked up two possible cushions and sighed at them. The King's simple former chamber was suddenly totally unsuitable – and all their effort, during the last ten days of waiting for _T_ _he Dawn Treader's_ return, in getting it ready for him was wasted. The much bigger set of apartments in the wing above the Library had to be opened up and made ready at once. Which was why she was up here, arranging furniture and choosing cushions with the aid of a couple of fauns-in-waiting, while the Royal party was touring the rest of the castle.

She had been up here almost all morning, apart from a brief pause to acquire respectability in shoes and stockings again, and sweep her wind-blown hair back into its usual tidy bun. The matter of the Royal Apartments had been Oscuns' second pressing concern after the feast – all that must be done and that Gwen must do it because she alone, apart from Caspian's old Nurse, knew anything at all about having a castle with a Queen in it.

A Queen! Gwen looked carefully about the room. Furniture arranged, curtains hung, sea-chests unpacked as they had come up piecemeal from the ship, and everything Caspian might need brought over from his old chamber. There only remained the trimmings, such as the cushions on the footstool. Gwen fixed her mind firmly on the cushions. "I suppose that will do," she said, handing the softer one over. Had that not been said once before?

Gwen turned and went over to the window. A different castle, a different window, and the roses up the walls not in neat little rows in the garden – but the same Person watching over it all. "Let it be a girl, hey?" said Gwen softly, with a little smile. She nodded. "Thank You." The Star's daughter did not look in the least like she was going to grow fat and frumpy and frilly with age.

Age … Gwen steered quickly away from that line of thought, and turned quickly to look over the room from this angle. Yes, for the moment, there was nothing more. It might be impromptu, but it wasn't too bad for a day's work. She smiled at her two assistants. "Go and get some lunch, and tell someone else to tell Her Majesty that her apartments are ready for her inspection when she pleases."

Mentius and Voluns vanished with the speed of hungry fauns who have worked all morning and afternoon without a break. Gwen herself had taken a brief break for lunch – not to eat it but to rush down and help Oscuns with the near riot that had broken out, where all the other fauns-in-waiting _and_ Bethen _and_ Rhianel had all wanted to be the ones to wait on the royal party having their lunch on the terrace. The royal lunch had been slightly delayed while Gwen had scolded the girls back to the kitchens and Oscuns had arranged a sort of rota system in which a different faun took each dish.

Gwen paced quietly through the apartments, forcing her mind to think only about the here-and-now. Was this tapestry hanging quite straight? Was that chair pulled towards the hearth at just the right angle? Were the pine-cones in the fireplace – a gift ten days ago from the Talking Squirrels – arranged just as perfectly as they had been in Caspian's previous rooms?

It had been easier when she had been busy, with something to do with her hands and consider with her mind, with a crowd of duties to push aside her thoughts. Now there was only – waiting. The Queen's lady-in-waiting, if not formally confirmed as such. Waiting, with the memory of this morning nagging away – only drowned out by the louder anxiety of – what now?

Rhoop was back. And he was touring the castle with the King and the rest of the royal party, while she was here, attending to the whole life of responsibilities that had become hers in the four years since the War of Deliverance. Four years Rhoop knew nothing about – except they weren't the only four years he knew nothing about, any more than it was only four years of his life she knew nothing about! Years and years and years seemed to rise up before Gwen – so much time apart! She had been – what? Not much older than Caspian now, when Rhoop had gone away; Rhoop a year older. And he had promised to come back, and she had promised to wait for him – but now? They were two different people – what if–?

She hadn't waited, she hadn't found out, she hadn't asked. _She hadn't even stopped to think,_ Gwen reprimanded herself sternly at the renewed thought of this morning. She had flung herself headlong at Rhoop and what if he – didn't – any more? She didn't know him at all, really, any more. That thin, white-haired man with the deep lines on his face – that was not the confident young man who had ridden away all those years before.

And he probably felt the same gulf the other way. You didn't get to be gaunt and lined and white-haired without a thousand troubles and adventures – all of which she knew nothing about. All those years, and she had lived quietly, comfortably, here in Narnia; at no risk whatsoever apart from possibly bursting a blood-vessel suppressing annoyance at the petty ways of Prunaprismia!

The whole situation was foolish, if not impossible! The matter should have been allowed to rest quietly, and instead she had jumped straight in with both feet – bare feet!

Gwen sighed in despair at her foolishness. This new Queen did not need ladies-in-waiting who were fat as well as foolish! On a practical note, this new Queen would need some Dryads-in-waiting to be recruited, though Gwen doubted that would be at all difficult, if the example of the fauns' enthusiasm at lunch-time was anything to go by. But they would need training, of course, and until then the Queen would have to manage with Gwen only. Lady Mavramorn, Gwen supposed, might help. It depended on exactly what the Duke of Galma's daughter, as it was reported she was, was used to.

But still, the duty of attending on the Queen would be mostly her own. ' _I shall take one of those Vows of Devotion to the Throne,'_ her own, years-younger self had once said.

And Rhoop – the Rhoop she had known – had laughed. _'Break it when I come home, won't you?'_

No. She couldn't.

Gwen opened the door and went out into the corridor. Ladies-in-waiting did not sit down in the royal apartments unless invited to by one of their Majesties – besides which, the rooms were too perfect for anyone to sit down in without disturbing things. All must stay just as it was until the Queen was here to see it. Gwen sat down on one of the polished chests in the corridor. There was nothing to do but wait.

~:~

The Queen did not arrive to view her new living quarters until nearly dinner time. Gwen had chanced one or two quick dashes down to help Oscuns with the arrangements for the great Welcoming Feast, before Voluns came hurrying to find her and whisper that Her Majesty wanted to speak with her Lady-in-waiting.

It was the King to see the rooms, too. Caspian merely looked around, nodded and smiled and then vanished to get changed for the feast, dropping a quick kiss on the Queen's cheek on his way. Gwen looked carefully at the floor. It was strange to be a proper lady-in-waiting again; the quiet mask of decorum that passed and fetched and carried. She felt, somehow, that the Queen would have wanted to be friendlier, to be more as Queen Susan and Queen Lucy had been than Prunaprismia. But Gwen couldn't manage it – not after the morning, at any rate.

The Queen was almost finished when the door burst open. "Oh!" said Lady Mavramorn. She dropped a hasty curtsey. "I'm too late. To help, I mean."

Gwen cast half a glance over her shoulder, even as she carried on brushing the Queen's long golden hair. "You didn't need to come and help."

"I should have! I hurried so I could!" Gwen noted that her gown looked rather as if she had, but this fact didn't seem to have registered with Lady Mavramorn. She shut the door and trotted round to stand in front of the Queen with a rather anxious expression on the squint and the freckles. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty," she murmured, curtseying again.

"You will have to help," said the Queen in very gentle reproach. "Lady Gwen can't be expected to have all the trouble."

"It isn't trouble, Your Majesty," said Gwen automatically.

The Queen looked round, and there was definitely friendly amusement like one might have expected from Queen Lucy in her eyes. " _I_ have been finding fixing my hair for grand banquets somewhat of a trouble..."

There might have been something more said, as Gwen and the Queen looked at each other, some sort of understanding reached, but Lady Mavramorn piped up again in the silence. "Mavramorn" – and she blushed happily – "says His Majesty is waiting for you, Your Majesty. When you are ready?"

There was an understanding between those two, Gwen noted, as the Queen smiled and Lady Mavramorn smiled back and held the door open for her to pass through. A hum of voices arose – Caspian's, Mavramorn's, their two wives' in reply. Gwen stood still and waited while they passed on out of earshot. Then she put down the hairbrush in the gold embossed tray on the dressing table. It seemed to make a very loud noise in the utter quiet. She looked down at her own gown. It was not her best, not a gown for wearing to such an occasion as Narnia fêteing its returned King and new Queen.

She would have to go and change. She had better go at once. But Gwen somehow couldn't move. She spread out her hands and considered them, instead. Large, and bone-y, and so much older than either the Queen or Lady Mavramorn. Two happy young brides.

Gwen opened the door – and then turned sharply to the left, away from her own room and her best gown towards the back stairs and the kitchens. She just – couldn't – do it.

Oscuns was not in the kitchens, but Bethen was, flying about between serving trays and simmering pots. "Hello!" she cried. "It'll be all right, really it will!"

Gwen smiled. "I'm sure it will. Would you tell Master Oscuns I'm … too tired. After – it's been a long day. I'm just going to sit quietly."

Bethen paused with a dripping ladle in one hand. "Miss the feast?"

"Yes."

For a moment, Bethen looked completely blank. Then she nodded. "All right... if you're sure. I mean, yes, of course. I will. Do you need a cup of chamomile? If you're tired?"

Cushions and chamomile! "No!" said Gwen desperately. "I – I'll get something later. Yes – later."

The ladle and the soup puddle on the floor suddenly seemed to dawn on Bethen, and she shrieked and rushed for the trestle table where the tureens waited. "I'll send Rhianel up to you!" she cried, lifting a quick succession of lids and plunging the ladle into what Gwen hoped was the matching flavour soup. "With a bite to eat! You need to eat, Lady Gwen! Even with a headache!"

Perhaps, Gwen reflected as she dragged her suddenly heavy feet back up the stairs towards her room, Aslan had allotted to her care two ever-anxious kitchen maids who were prone to dramatic announcements because she needed someone to care for her, now and again. For, in their own way, they did. Rhianel appeared within about half an hour, bearing a tray with soup and bread and cake and half a glass of wine, and three roses that seemed to have been stuck rather hastily into another wine glass, given the way the water had slopped out onto the tray cloth.

"Bethen said I was to stay and make sure you ate it," Rhianel announced happily, plopping herself down on Gwen's hearthrug. "Don't you think the Queen's just beautiful?!"

Sweet sixteen. Gwen sat and ate and listened to Rhianel's blissful chatter. The Queen, the King, the Queen, the King, Lady Mavramorn, the four Lords – all was wonderful if you were sixteen years old and unattached. On and on and on...

She had not had a headache, she had not said she had a headache, for all Bethen had assumed it, but Gwen began to feel she might get one if she listened to much more. She broke into the flow to venture something about the washing-up.

Rhianel leaped up with a shriek like Bethen's. "Oh dear, oh dear! And you need to rest! I'm going, I'm going! Oh, and Bethen will be cross with me! Oh, and Master Oscuns! Oh, Lady Gwen...!"

The lamentations continued until she was quite beyond Gwen's hearing; would probably continue all the way to the kitchens. Gwen just hoped Rhianel did not meet anybody important on the way. Even Master Oscuns, who knew the two kitchen maids, would incorrectly assume madness or inebriation.

Gwen shook her head. But perhaps there was some value in bright and harmless youthful chatter, for her room was suddenly dark and empty. Shadows crept out from the corners, dark compared to the bit of bright evening sky outside the window. Rhianel must have chattered for over an hour, if not two. Two! Gwen smiled a very small smile, for the two balled-up holed stockings of this morning were looking back at her, rather reproachfully, from the top of the mending basket.

It seemed so very, very long since the brightness of this morning. Gwen sighed. _You need to rest._ But she wasn't really tired. And resting was simply being alone with her turmoil of thoughts. They came flocking back now the chatter was gone. What, what, what? The King was home. The "Four Lords," as Rhianel had lightly termed them, were home. And what?

Gwen swallowed. She was not going to cry. In fact, she didn't think she _could_ cry. The bread and soup seemed to have stuck as a vast lump in her throat.

 _Oh Aslan, what? What now?_

The room was silent. After a minute, Gwen stood up. Whatever she should or should not do, moping in her room probably wasn't it. There was a last chest of gowns which had come up late from the _Dawn Treader._ The Queen had said they didn't matter, not being unpacked until tomorrow, but it might as well be done now. The feast would probably be over by now, but the royal party would not be retiring just yet. Outside the window, or in any room in fact that was brighter than her own, it was still light. It was still only early evening. The King, the Queen, and their – companions – would sit in one of the reception rooms or go down to the shore or walk on the terrace. It was a shame the gardens around the Cair were not really developed very well, compared to the ones at Beaversdam, for people to walk in of an evening, but there were plenty of places for them to go. She would have the royal apartments to herself to do that unpacking.

It wasn't as if the Lady-in-waiting had anything else to do.

Voluns was pattering along the corridor as Gwen reached the small side door that led into the Royal closets. She stepped aside to let him past. He stopped and made a little bow. "The King has sent for you, Lady Gwen. In his study."

"The King?" Gwen queried.

Voluns nodded. "His Majesty said it was quite urgent, and whatever else you were doing you were to please leave."

Gwen bowed her head and mentally gave up the dream of the small comfort of knowing that she had done all the unpacking. It was a pretty hopelessly small comfort, but it would have been something. "At once," she said, and turned towards the main stairs. There was no patter of faun hooves after her. Caspian must have known she would come, no matter what, and told Voluns not to accompany her.

Why on earth would Caspian want to speak to her? Gwen doubted it was about her undignified appearance first thing this morning. The king was, after all, not his aunt. Maybe it was something for his rooms. Maybe, and probably most likely, it was something he wanted for the Queen. Gwen made herself smile, because it was – if you weren't hurting like you had never hurt before, even when the Voice had been lost in the tangled forest – nice to have Caspian home in Cair Paravel again. Even the empty staircase seemed more full of life than it had done in all the months he had been away. She turned down the long passage to the King's study, tapped once on the door, and went in.

Caspian was standing by the long windows that opened out onto the terrace. There was something, though Gwen couldn't place it, something almost in the movement of the air in the room, which suggested there was somebody else in the room, too. But no-one else was visible. Caspian looked round and smiled as the door clicked shut.

Gwen curtseyed. "Your Majesty sent for me?"

"Yes." Caspian paused. "Yes. I did."

There was a silence. Gwen waited, and Caspian looked back out of the window. He sighed, ran his hands through his hair, sighed again. "Reepicheep," he said eventually.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"I suppose you have heard he went on to Aslan's country and did not return."

It was stupid to keep saying the same thing, but the answer was the same. "Yes, Your Majesty."

"He was a good friend, Reepicheep." The King's voice sounded as if the loss of the Mouse had only really struck home, or had struck home afresh, back here in Cair Paravel. The lump in Gwen's throat seemed to get a little bigger. Never again would Reepicheep's feet patter across the stone floors and that high and serious voice graciously address one. It seemed terribly appropriate that the King should speak of him first as a friend, despite all else Reepicheep had been.

"He would have wanted you to know, I think," said Caspian. "He counted you among his friends."

"Thank you, Your Majesty." Gwen bowed her head politely and then, because something more so very much seemed to need to be said about the courtliest and most chivalrous of Caspian's Knights, she added: "Reepicheep counted anyone who was the Lion's friend as his own."

A sudden light seemed to replace the touch of sorrow on the King's face. "Do you know?" he said brightly. "That is the best and truest thing anybody has said about Reep!"

Gwen hesitated. It was an inappropriate thing to say from a lady-in-waiting to a king, but perhaps it was not between two friends of Aslan: "I trust this has not spoiled Your Majesty's homecoming?"

Now Caspian's face did light up, bright with the same expression of humble and earnest joy as when he had ridden home the autumn before last after the defeat of the giants. "Narnia could not have given the Queen and I a sweeter homecoming." His gaze flickered for a moment towards the part of the study Gwen could not see from where she stood, and then Caspian went on. "The Queen … wished me to thank you for all the trouble you have gone to, making things ready. Especially as we sent no word of warning."

Gwen opened her mouth to say again that it was no trouble, but Caspian hadn't finished. "And – and she – wants – she and I – we – we would – would like you to leave off now, and go for a walk in the orchards."

"To – to what?!" said Gwen blankly. There was no doubt about it: the King suddenly blushed, deeply, and his eyes flickered uncertainly from where Gwen stood to the spot she could not see.

"Go – for a walk – in the orchards." Caspian gestured to the door he stood by, the private monarch's door onto the terrace with its access to the lawns and orchards beyond. "You have been working – too hard, all day. And-"

Caspian looked down and his voice was quieter and more solemn. "And I didn't realise. And I'm sorry."

"There isn't … anything … for you …" Gwen's mind stumbled at a loss for words.

"Yes there is," said the King, all at once as quick and stubborn as his uncle had ever sounded. "Now. Please. Go."

He looked at her in silence. And Gwen curtseyed, as a lady-in-waiting should. "Thank you, Your Majesty."

Caspian's head moved a fraction, as if he was about to nod in dismissal, as a king should. But then he held out one hand and took hers, as King Edmund had that day in Beruna over four years ago. He looked at her, opened his mouth, shut it, wet his lips – and finally shook his head. A king, Gwen noted, and yet a young man very much in love and suddenly understanding a lot more.

"Don't thank me," Caspian got out in the end. "Just – go. Please. And I'm sorry. Do – go."

She went. Straightened her gown, and tried to smile but found she was only blushing – and went. Out of the monarch's door onto the terrace, and down the little flight of steps onto the lawn, and across the lawn to the gate into the orchards.

Gwen found her hands struggling a little to fasten the latch after herself. She shook her head impatiently and forced it down anyhow, then turned towards the rows of trees. They were such ancient old trees, planted by the Four Monarchs themselves in the Golden Age. Gwen gazed up into the boughs. It was too early for the harvest yet, but the boughs were laden with the growing fruit. Harvest would be glorious when it came. She reached out and took hold of the tips of a near branch. Did they know? Was this the trees' way of welcoming the King and Queen home? Or was it because – once again – those Monarchs had been back in Narnia? King Edmund, Queen Lucy – Gwen smiled at the thought. And they, it seemed, had gone on with their kinsman and Reepicheep into Aslan's country, where nothing was ever sad or troublesome again.

That light behind Queen Lucy's eyes! No wonder even the crewmen of the _Dawn Treader_ seemed to have come home with some shining happiness about them. Everybody except-

Rhoop was there, a little way down the line of trees. And her movement, or maybe just the bright colour of her gown among the green leaves, seemed to catch his eye. Rhoop glanced up, and then seemed to thrust something behind or into the bush he stood by, before straightening and turning towards her.

It was only past three trees. It was far less distance than she had run this morning. It seemed miles before Gwen came up to him. "Rhoop," she said.

It seemed forever before he answered. "Gwen."

The little leafy whispers and rustles of the orchard went on. And on. And on.

"I haven't seen you all day," said Gwen eventually.

"No." Rhoop looked down. "I suppose you were – busy."

"A feast is a lot of work," Gwen observed. "Especially at short notice."

"Yes." Again there was nothing but the noise of the trees. "It was a nice feast," Rhoop remarked in the end, his voice sounding carefully polite. "Argoz seemed to enjoy it."

"Argoz always liked good food."

Caspian had been to the end of the world to bring him back, had sent the two of them to speak to each other, and they could say nothing but polite common-places about a mutual friend!

Aye, for not even a king's command could change time nor the barriers that grew in it. They stood beneath the trees, and so many years of life – two such very different lives – seemed to stand between them as an impenetrable barrier.

"I hear Lord Bern lives too," Gwen ventured. That news had, in fact, come earlier than the _Dawn Treader_. Official dispatches from the Duke of the Lone Islands to Trumpkin, Regent of Narnia, had arrived at the start of the year on the first trading ship from the Lone Islands in living memory.

Rhoop nodded. "Only Octesian and Restimar-" He stopped.

And you, Gwen thought stubbornly. And you! For the man who had come back was not the one who had gone away. "I'm sorry," she said.

Again, he nodded, briefly as if it was a trying thing to have to acknowledge her condolences. "I presume … you must have known Reepicheep?"

For a moment, Gwen couldn't seem to find the will to answer. Then she too nodded. "Yes." What was the point? Why were they even having this conversation, if it could even be called such?

Perhaps Rhoop was having the same thought, for he seemed to glance at her with a wondering, puzzled expression she didn't know. Gwen felt suddenly defensive. "King Caspian sent me out here," she said shortly.

The expression in Rhoop's eyes changed to something totally unreadable. "Did he – does he – know – about-?"

The matter seemed to stick there, too difficult to be said. Gwen folded her arms and looked down. "I told no-one," she said, trying very hard not make her voice sound as small and sad as it threatened to. "But I suppose it was rather obvious this morning." The barrier which seemed to bristle even more over the thoughtless, reckless way she had flung herself through it this morning. "I – I – don't know how that happened," she blurted out.

"How what happened?"

The barrier! Once, long long ago, they had known what each other meant without asking, barely without saying it.

"This morning," said Gwen shortly. Now, of all times, she had to go and blush!

"But Gwen-!"

For the first time, it was two real words! Not measured, not polite, not an unknown mask – it was the exclamation of the boy she had known, and Gwen looked up with a jerk, quite despite herself.

"That-!" Rhoop stopped, and Gwen could only see the man again, the man with twenty years binding his tongue. The bleached white hair, the thin, drawn face she didn't know. His mouth worked, his lips moved, but no words came.

 _They had been apart too lon-_

"No!"

When Rhoop jumped, Gwen realised she had said it out loud. But she suddenly didn't care, any more than she had cared this morning! "What?!" she demanded desperately. " 'That-!' – _w_ _hat?!_ "

 _Aslan! I asked that he should come back to me! All those years ago! Don't let him just come back! Give him back – to me!_

"That was what I needed!" said Rhoop abruptly, with fierce determination as of one getting the words out despite everything. And he took one quick step forwards and seized her shoulders, as he had done the day they had parted and argued on the stairs at Beaversdam. "That was what I needed, to know that– that–"

He broke off again, and his hands loosened their hard grip as if to let go. Gwen put up her own hands and held his on. "That what?" she repeated gently. "That what, my Lord Rhoop?"

He smiled at his name, and Gwen smiled too. For his smile had not changed. If nothing else, his smile had not changed. It had a thousand lines carved into it, but it had not changed.

"That Aslan had heard my prayer," Rhoop whispered back. "When I realised, on the journey back, after I'd met Him on Coriakin's Island, that I really was coming back. That by His doing, and Caspian's, I was keeping that old selfish promise I'd made. And I realised, I couldn't keep you to that. Anything might have happened; I could only trust you to Him. And I kept telling myself, and Aslan, all the way home, that I _would_ give you up; that by His grace I _could_ give you up. I wouldn't cling selfishly to an old promise – that I'd trust you to Him. And I knew, knew, knew that was right – but it hurt – especially with – the king – and Mavramorn – but then – then – you were there. And you'd waited – all these years. And– and you still – loved – me – enough to-"

Rhoop got no further. Because the barrier of the years was gone, and Gwen took the last step forwards into the space between them, and he kissed her. A long, hard kiss – as he had not kissed her this morning – a kiss of love and homecoming and being sent back to one another.

"Oh, old girl, old girl..." It was what Rhoop had once called Felicia as a term of endearment, and Gwen found she didn't mind in the least, not when his eyes shone like that and his voice shook. His arms around her shook too. Gwen put her arms round him to steady them both.

"You came back," she said, in a rather wobbly voice. "He sent you back … just like I'd asked – like we'd both asked..."

"Just like we'd both asked," Rhoop echoed. "Except I think I included not to make you cry, and you are, old girl-"

Gwen buried her face in his shoulder. "That's nothing," she mumbled. "You should have seen me at the coronation. I was a waterspout; you'd have been ashamed of me..."

The man – the man who was the older version of the boy whom she had loved – chuckled his deep, rich chuckle – the older version of the boy's chuckle she had known and loved all her life. "Gwen?" he said solemnly, lifting her head off his shoulder. "Gwen?"

"Yes?"

"I think I would have just kissed you, not been ashamed of you."

"Which you are not going to do now," said Gwen firmly.

He raised one white eyebrow. "No?"

Gwen raised both her eyebrows demurely back at him. "Not until you've shown me what it was you hid when you saw me coming."

"Oh!" Now, suddenly, Rhoop blushed.

"What?!" Gwen demanded. "Hmmm?"

Rhoop opened his mouth, and shut it, and then let go of her and stepped away to the bush he had been standing by. "The orchard," he said, gesturing up at the great old trees, "reminded me. Of a long time ago. And – I was so bothered, all day – wanting you – trying not to want you – if you didn't want me. I realised I _had_ to speak to you, whatever happened. So I slipped away out here. I – I was going to come and look for you. And bring you this. If you wanted it."

A daisy chain. A somewhat clumsy daisy chain, for the man with the sea-farer's hands was no better at it than a little girl of six had been, and this chain was further taxed by having the little wild roses, which had not grown in the Beaversdam orchards but did at Cair Paravel, woven through it.

"But I hadn't finished it yet," said Rhoop, with a reluctant-sounding half laugh.

"I'll wait," said Gwen. Her voice was peskily thick, and she forced it into a laugh to match his. "I've had – plenty of practice – at waiting."

Pain sprang up in the back of Rhoop's eyes. "Gwen," he said, his voice suddenly low. "I – couldn't come back. The others – slept. I – was trapped. In – darkness – waiting – they wouldn't let me go, until the King and – and Aslan, He said – came. And the bird led us out."

The bird? Gwen put her hand gently on Rhoop's arm, and the pain seemed to lift from his eyes. If that bird last year–

Well, they had so much to join up, from all these years of waiting. But first-

She nodded towards the wreath. "Courage, dear heart." Make this whole. Finish what a Greater One than us has done.

One, two, three more roses – three for the years of waiting for Caspian's voyage. One for last year, one for this year – and it was finished.

They both stood and looked at it. Then Rhoop lifted it gently towards her. "Bend your head down a bit, my Gwen."

~:~:~:~

" _...things too amazing for me … to understand: … the way of a ship on the sea, and the way of a man and a woman..."_

 _~:~:~The End~:~:~_

 _A/N: As we started this fic with a challenge, so we shall end! Book, chapter and verse, and the plot bunnies will put Lemon Sponge Pie in your inbox! I have tried to persuade them this will be very very sticky … ;)_

 _Thank you to all of you who have been reading this; and special thanks to my brother, for patiently beta-ing it; to Tam, for insisting that there had to be a kiss somewhere; and to Laura, from whose fic 'Sure as the Tide' much of the substance of the early part of this chapter came._

 _Excuse me. The author is happy and sad, all together. May the Lion of Judah bless you all._

 _~:~:~_


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